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Injection Molding Cost Keeps HIGH? 8 Ways to Reduce Your Injection Molding Cost
Ways to reduce thr injection molding cost
This post gives you some advice on reducing the injection molding cost from 8 aspects.
1. Production workshop
The layout of production workshop focuses on two aspects:
- meeting the production requirements, optimizing the layout according to the production process
- meeting the requirements for flexible energy use under specific production conditions.
1) The power supply has an appropriate margin while satisfying the power required for stable production. What’s more, the surplus is not too large, resulting in waste of consumption.
2) Build an efficient cooling water circulation facility and equip the cooling water system with an effective insulation system.
3).Optimize the overall production layout of the workshop. Many productions have successive processes. And reasonable cooperation can reduce the time and energy consumption required for turnover and improve production efficiency.
4) Consider the most effective small units for separated control of lighting and other plant equipment.
5) Regular maintain the workshop equipment to avoid damage of the public facilities. That will affect the normal operation of production, resulting in increased energy consumption .
2. Injection molding machine
The injection molding machine is a large energy consumer in the injection molding workshop. And the energy consumption is mainly in two parts, the motor and the heating.
1). Select the appropriate injection molding machine according to the characteristics of the product. Big injection molding making small plastic parts often means a lot of energy waste.
2). Adopt new heating technology, such as electromagnetic induction heating, infrared heating, etc., can achieve 20-70% of heating and energy saving.
3). Use effective insulation measures for heating and cooling systems to reduce heat and cold losses.
4). Maintain good lubrication of the transmission components of the equipment to reduce the energy consumption caused by increased friction or unstable operation of the equipment.
5). Use low-compression hydraulic oil to reduce the waste of working energy in the hydraulic system.
6). Use parallel motion, multi-cavity injection molding, multi-component injection molding and other processing technologies can significantly save energy.
7) The traditional mechanical hydraulic injection molding machine also has a variety of energy-saving drive systems, replacing the traditional fixed variable pump mechanical. And the hydraulic injection molding machine energy-saving effect is significant.
8). Regularly maintain the heating and cooling pipelines to ensure that there are no impurities and scales inside the pipelines, and achieve the heating and cooling efficiency
9). Ensure that the injection molding machine is in good working condition. Unstable processing can result in defective products and increase energy consumption.
10). Ensure that the working machine is suitable for the products processed, such as PVC processing often requires the use of special screws.
3. Injection mold
Mold structure and mold conditions often have a significant impact on the injection molding cycle time and processing energy consumption.
1). Reasonable mold design, including runner design, gate form, number of cavities, heating and cooling water channels, etc., all help to reduce energy consumption.
2) Adoption of hot runner mold, not only can save materials, reduce energy consumption of material recycle. While the molding process also has significant energy-saving effects.
3) Contouring fast cooling fast hot mold can significantly save processing energy consumption and achieve better surface quality.
4) Ensure balanced filling of each cavity. That will contribute to shorten the molding cycle time, ensure product quality uniformity, and have excellent energy-saving effects.
5) Use CAE-assisted design technology for mold design, mold flow analysis and simulation. This can reduce the energy consumption of mold debugging and multiple mold repair.
6) Under the premise of the quality product, the lower clamping force used for shaping, which contributes to extend the life of the mold, is conducive to the rapid filling of the mold, and helps energy saving.
7) Do a good job of mold maintenance to ensure effective heating and cooling pipeline conditions.
4. Auxiliary equipments
1) Choose the appropriate auxiliary equipments. The equipments must not only meet the work requirements, but also not too big.
2) Improve the maintenance of equipment and ensure that the equipment is in normal working condition. Auxiliary equipment that is not working properly may cause unstable production or even poor quality of parts, resulting in increased energy consumption.
3) Optimize the cooperation and operation sequence between injection machine and auxiliary machines.
4) Optimize the mutual position of injection machine and auxilary equipments. Then, try to place the accessories be closer to the injection machine as much as possible without affecting the operating conditions.
5) Many auxiliary equipment manufacturers provide on-demand energy-saving systems that can achieve significant energy savings.
6) Use fast mold change equipment to reduce the waiting time required to change products during production.
5. Materials
The energy consumption of different materials processing is different. At the same time, poor or improper management of recycled materials will increase production energy consumption. And this will result in the increasing injection molding cost.
1) Under the premise of satisfying the performance of the product, the material with lower processing energy consumption should be preferred.
2) Under the condition of satisfying the performance and cost optimization, the high-flow material is preferred.
3) Please note that materials from different suppliers may have different process conditions.
4) Better use the material drying treatment once it is dried to avoid the material getting damp again and wasting energy.
5) Preserve the materials to prevent the material from mixing impurities, and ultimately cause product defects.
6) Some products are allowed to add certain recycled materials, but attention should be paid to the preservation and cleanliness of the recycled materials to avoid defective parts due to unclean materials.
6. Processing technology
1) Under the premise of satisfying the performance of the product, adopt the shortest molding cycle time.
2) If there is no special factor, try to use the processing technology recommended by the supplier.
3) For all specific products and molds, save all stable equipment and process parameters to shorten the adjustment time of the next production.
4) Optimize the process, use a lower clamping force, a shorter cooling time and a pressure holding time.
7. Adopt new technology
1). Adopt assisted molding technology, such as gas assist, liquid assist, steam assist, micro foam injection molding technology.
2). Adopt a unitized molding scheme to reduce intermediate links.
3) Use in-mold welding, spraying, assembly, decoration and other new technologies.
4) Adopt new low-pressure molding technology to shorten the molding cycle and reduce the melted temperature.
5) Adopt energy regeneration system.
8. Production management
1). Producing high-quality products at one time and reducing the reject ratio is the biggest energy saving, which can reduce the injection molding cost.
2). The maintenance and energy consumption of the entire production system is closely related. This involves not only the injection machines, but also the auxiliary equipments. For example, if the crane doesn’t work, it needs manpower to change the mold, which will inevitably result in time-consumption and increase the energy consumption of the equipment.
3). Workshop equipped with energy consumption monitoring system to facilitate the implementation of energy analysis and improvement.
4). When shuting down the equipment for maintenance, we should not only inspect the maintenance contents and items of the equipment itself, but also to check the condition of the connection between the equipment and other systems, and the reliable working performance.
5). Regularly compare with industry benchmarks to see if there is room for further improvement.
6). Establish reliable contracts and cooperative relationships with suppliers, which is beneficial to energy conservation management of enterprise.
Have you got other opinions on reducing the injection molding cost? If you have some new ideas, you are welcome to leave a comment for us and we can have a discussion about it. Thank you for reading to the end of this post.
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