For an injection molding factory, the injection molding process takes up a large amount of energy, accounting for over 60% of the factory’s overall energy consumption. Thus, the more energy-efficient the injection molding process becomes, the more energy the factory can save. With the continuous development of the injection molding machine’s energy-saving technology itself, reducing the overall energy consumption of injection molding factory needs to be comprehensively considered from the aspects of production management, manufacturing technology and materials, production workshop matching, etc. In this article, we are going to discuss about some tips on reducing plastic injection molding machine consumption.
Production Workshop
The layout of production workshop is mainly considered from two aspects: under the condition of meeting the production demand, optimize the layout according to the production process, and meet the requirements of flexible energy use under specific production conditions.
1. Power supply, while meeting the needs for stable production, has a margin of excess energy that is above that which would cause the power supply to continuously run without producing any power.
2. Build efficient cooling water circulation facilities and equip cooling water system with effective insulation system.
3. Ensure that the production arrangement of the workshops is maximized. A lot of production processes have a sequence of cooperation, reasonable cooperation can reduce the turnover time and energy consumption, improve production efficiency.
4. For lighting and other plant equipment, the most effective small unit shall be considered as far as possible.
5. The workshop equipment should be maintained regularly to avoid the damage of public facilities, which will affect the normal operation of production, and then increase the energy consumption.
Plastic Injection Molding Machine
Injection molding machine is a major energy consumer in injection molding workshop, which mainly includes motor and heating.
1. Choose the right injection molding machine according to the product characteristics. “Big horse pull small car” injection molding often means a lot of energy waste.
2. All types of electric injection molding machine and hybrid power injection molding machine have excellent energy saving effect, which can save energy by 20-80%.
3. Using new heating technology, such as electromagnetic induction heating, infrared heating, these new heating techniques can save over 20% of the energy needed for heating.
4. To avoid excessive heat and cold, however, insulation measures are adopted for heating and cooling systems to reduce heat loss.
5. Make sure the parts that come into contact with the transmission are well lubricated and decrease the energy consumption caused by increased friction or unstable operation of the equipment.
6. When choose the hydraulic oil, choose the oil of low compression to reduce the system energy waste.
7. In their attempt to reduce energy consumption, you can use multi-cavity injection molding, multi-component injection molding and other processing technologies to significantly reduce energy consumption.
8. The traditional mechanical hydraulic injection molding machine also has a variety of energy-saving drive systems, which can replace the traditional quantitative pump mechanical hydraulic injection molding machine with remarkable energy-saving effect.
9. Regularly maintain the heating and cooling pipes to ensure that there are no impurities and scale blockage inside the pipes, so as to achieve the designed heating and cooling efficiency.
10. Ensure that the injection molding machine is in good working condition. Unstable processing may lead to defective products and increase energy consumption.
11. To ensure that the equipment used is suitable for the products to be processed, such as PVC processing, special screw is often used.
Injection Mold
Problems with mold structure (molds) and mold condition (mold cavity) often have a significant impact on injection molding cycle and processing energy consumption.
1. Use of reasonable mold design, including runner design, gate type, cavity number, heating and cooling channels, and bypass channels, can help to reduce energy usage.
2. Using hot runner mold will reduce the materials required and would save huge energy consumed in the entire process, while at the same time reducing the energy used to form the powder.
3. The rapid cooling and rapid heating enable the temperature control of mold is significantly saves energy consumption. It achieve better surface quality.
4. To avoid any disturbance and ensure the balanced filling of the cavity will help to shorten the moulding cycle, reduce the variation in the quality of the product, and have an energy saving effect.
5. Using CAE aided design, mold flow analysis, mechanical simulation technologies can reduce the energy consumption (cost of repair) of mold design, the mold design process and the machining process.
6. To ensure the quality of products and prevent the discoloration of molds, it’s preferable to use low clamping force to form molds. This is a will make the mold fill much faster. This will also help reduce the energy spent to make molds.
7. You should take good care and maintenance of heating and cooling channels, which ensures effective heat transfer.
Peripheral Equipment
1. The selection of auxiliary equipment with suitable capacity can not only meet the work requirements, but also avoid excessive redundancy.
2. Do a good job of equipment maintenance to ensure that the equipment is in normal working condition. Abnormal auxiliary equipment will lead to unstable production and even poor quality of parts, resulting in increased energy consumption.
3. Optimize the working sequence with the peripheral equipment.
4. Optimize the mutual position of peripheral equipment and production equipment, and make the peripheral equipment as close to the host as possible without affecting the operation conditions.
5. Many auxiliary equipment manufacturers provide on-demand energy supply system, which can achieve significant energy saving.
6. Use fast mold changing equipment to reduce the waiting time for switching products in production.
Materials
The energy consumption of different materials is different, and the improper management of materials or recycled materials will increase the production energy consumption.
1. Based on the objective that the product performs better, we would like to take a material with a lower processing energy consumption.
2. It is a priority for the company to optimize performance and cost when the production of the product is concerned.
3. The two chemists regard material from different suppliers as having different deposition conditions.
4. After drying, the best material to use is with drying, to avoid material remaining moisture to go so waste energy and money
5. Do a good job at preserving materials by routinely collecting samples and collecting them at different times to prevent materials from mixing with impurities or foreign matters.
6. Some products have the ability to add certain recycled materials into the mix, but these products should be closely monitored to ensure the quality of recycled material is not affected by unclean products or lingering chemicals.
Processing Technology
1. On the premise of satisfying product performance, use the shortest molding cycle.
2. If there are no special factors, use the processing technology recommended by the supplier for processing as much as possible.
3. For specific products and molds, all stable equipment and process parameters are saved to shorten the time for adjusting the machine next time the production is replaced.
4. Optimize the process, adopt lower clamping force, shorter cooling time and pressure holding time.
Adopt New Technology
1.Adopt auxiliary molding technology, such as gas-assisted, liquid-assisted, steam-assisted, micro-foam injection molding technology, etc.
2. Adopt a unitized molding scheme to reduce intermediate links.
3. Adopt new technologies such as in-mold welding, in-mold spraying, in-mold assembly, and in-mold decoration.
4. The use of new low-pressure molding technology shortens the molding cycle and reduces the melt temperature.
5. Adopt energy regeneration system.
