Hot Runners

New valve gate hot runner molding technology precisely controls each valve pin's position, acceleration, velocity, and stroke, offering potential benefits to multimaterial applications, sequential/cascading molding, and premium cosmetic surfaces.

A side-gated hot runner system from Thermoplay promises perfectly round cylinders with even wall thicknesses throughout, very important traits in syringe barrels or pipettes. That application, which Thermoplay and its U.S. distributor, Alba Enterprises, showed off at PLASTEC West 2011 garnered a lot of interest from medically minded show attendees.

The new Multi Shot Z10440/... from Hasco Hasenclever (Lüdenscheid, Germany) has been designed specifically for side gating and is ideal for articles such as sleeves and cannula tubes. The nozzle has been conceived specifically for application with polyolefins.

Hot runner supplier Ewikon’s major focus over the past year has been to expand and optimize its range of hot runner products for medical applications. The result is a broad range of hot runner technology specifically targeted to meet the demands of the medical industry for both high-volume disposables or the production of precision components where safety is a major consideration.   

Mold Hotrunner Solutions (MHS) introduces Rheo-Pro iVG, an innovation the company claims is the world’s most compact back-to-back valve gate hot runner system. The new iVG is the first and only internal valve gate on the market, claims MHS. Its patented design completely “rewrites the rules” of valve gating technology and opens up endless new possibilities for high-cavity stack molds, swivel molds, and multi-material injection molds.

A threaded leak-proof hot runner manifold nozzle and a pneumatic bolt-on actuator for valve gate hot runner systems are the latest additions to the hot runner product line of Synventive Molding Solutions (Peabody, MA).

A hot runner nozzle featuring a two-piece design with a body allows edge gate technology to be used with numerous materials, including difficult engineering resins. The design adopted in the Star-Line Crown Series from Heitec Hot Runner Systems (Burgwald-Bottendorf, Germany) enables mold maintenance to be performed in minutes without disassembling the tips or the crown. Expansion length is no longer a limiting factor and tool construction heights can be from 60-500 mm.

A hot runner nozzle featuring a two-piece design with a body allows edge gate technology to be used with numerous materials, including difficult engineering resins. The design adopted in the Star-Line Crown Series from Heitec Hot Runner Systems (Burgwald-Bottendorf, Germany) enables mold maintenance to be performed in minutes without disassembling the tips or the crown. Expansion length is no longer a limiting factor and tool construction heights can be from 60-500 mm.

Small, single-drop direct parts and direct runner sprue gating are two areas where the integrally heated 750 hot sprue bushing from D-M-E (Madison Heights, MI) can benefit processors. Heat transfer capability has reportedly been enhanced via an integrally heated design, resulting in a more uniform heat profile. The bushing’s replaceable thermocouple, strategically located near the melt flow channel, optimizes processing conditions for a wide range of  thermoplastics, according to the supplier.

Mold Hotrunner Solutions (Georgetown, ON) recently debuted its Rheo-Pro M05VG multi-tip valve-gate hot runner. It is said to be ideal for molding direct-gated microparts with crisp, clean gate marks, and it distributes melt through tight, circular clusters of six gates per nozzle. An X-shaped hot runner manifold system with four nozzles, for example, will feed a 24-cavity mold. The extremely tight gate spacing offers the most compact mold design for microparts.