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Surface appearance, Take Two: Foamed parts, great finish, no license neededSurface appearance, Take Two: Foamed parts, great finish, no license needed
There's more than one outfit claiming its inductive heating technology can revolutionize injection molding. Officials at the plastics institute in Lüdenscheid, Germany make the same claim for their Indumold heating development.
Matt Defosse
January 27, 2009
2 Min Read
Bottle opener made using Indumold
There's more than one outfit claiming its inductive heating technology can revolutionize injection molding. Officials at the plastics institute in Lüdenscheid, Germany make the same claim for their Indumold heating development.Judging from the top-notch parts MPW has seen made using both processes (click here for RocTool article), molders should keep their fingers crossed that inductive heating does not become another technology, like gas injection, that ends up so entangled in lawsuits and patent courts that processors are afraid to use it.Indumold made its public debut at the Fakuma trade show in southern Germany last October when a Wittmann Battenfeld press at the Lüdensheid institute’s (German acronym is KIMW) stand molded these (photo, left) bottle openers. Although they have a foamed core, the surface had a high-gloss appearance. Wittmann Battenfeld (Kottingbrunn, Austria) worked with the center on the development.
The foamed parts shown at Fakuma were free of sink marks, low in warpage, and of course the foam core helped keep weight down. They had none of the streaks and rough surfaces typical of foamed parts.
For the Indumold process, the melt is first injected with a foaming agent, while the mold is cyclically inductive heated, followed by cyclical tempering and cooling of the mold with double-circuit tempering devices. Officials at KIMW allow that cycle times may be slightly longer than conventional molding of parts with foamed cores.
Injecting into the hot mold also causes the outer surface of a part to become very compact, said Jörg Günther, director of surface technology at KIMW and a member of the Institute’s board of directors. This means parts molded using Indumold not only are more attractive than standard molded parts, but they also have higher mechanical strength.
Günther spoke with MPW at the Euromold trade show in Frankfurt, Germany in December. Continuing on Indumold, he said the only cost to a user would be the installation costs, which would involve bringing a small team from the KIMW to help set up the mold, a process he said should take no more than two to four days. There is no need for a license. “Essentially, we give it away,” he said, with enough interest generated at the Fakuma show, from molders in a variety of end-use markets, that he expects commercial use soon.—[email protected]
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