Eight Methods to Reduce the Cost of Injection Molding

1、 Production workshop

The layout of the production workshop focuses on 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 power demand for stable production, has appropriate margin, so as not to cause excessive non functional consumption due to excessive surplus.

2. Build efficient cooling water circulation facilities and equip the cooling water system with an effective insulation and thermal insulation system.

3. Optimize the overall production layout of the workshop. Many production processes are coordinated in sequence. Reasonable coordination can reduce the time and energy consumption required for turnover and improve production efficiency.

4. The lighting and other plant equipment shall be controlled separately with the most effective small unit as far as possible.

5. The workshop equipment shall be maintained regularly to avoid the damage of public facilities that will affect the normal operation of production and thus increase energy consumption.

2、 Injection molding machine

The injection molding machine is a major energy consumer in the injection molding workshop, and the energy consumption mainly consists of two parts: the motor and the heating.

1. Select the appropriate injection molding machine according to the product characteristics. The injection molding process of “big horse pulling small car” often means a lot of energy waste.

2. All electric injection molding machine and hybrid injection molding machine are selected, with excellent energy-saving effect, which can save energy by 20-80%.

3. New heating technologies, such as electromagnetic induction heating and infrared heating, can achieve 20-70% heating energy saving.

4. Effective thermal insulation measures shall be taken for heating and cooling systems to reduce heat and cold losses.

5. Keep the transmission parts of the equipment well lubricated, and reduce the increase in energy consumption caused by increased friction or unstable operation of the equipment.

6. Low compression hydraulic oil is selected to reduce the energy waste of hydraulic system.

7. Processing technologies such as parallel action, multi cavity injection molding and multi-component injection molding can significantly save energy.

8. The traditional mechanical hydraulic injection molding machine also has a variety of energy-saving drive systems, which can significantly save energy instead of the traditional mechanical hydraulic injection molding machine with constant displacement pump.

9. Regularly maintain the heating and cooling pipes to ensure that there are no impurities, scale blockage and other phenomena 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. Ensure that the equipment used is suitable for the products to be processed. For example, PVC processing often requires special screws.

3、 Injection Mold

Mold structure and mold condition often have a significant impact on injection molding cycle and processing energy consumption.

1. Reasonable mold design, including runner design, gate type, cavity number, heating and cooling channels, will help reduce energy consumption.

2. The use of hot runner mold can not only save materials and reduce energy consumption of material recycling, but also has significant energy-saving effect in the molding process itself.

3. Profiling fast cooling fast heating die can significantly save processing energy consumption and achieve better surface quality.

4. Ensure the balanced filling of all cavities, help shorten the molding cycle, ensure the product quality uniformity, and have excellent energy-saving effect.

5. The use of CAE aided design technology for mold design, mold flow analysis and simulation can reduce the energy consumption of mold debugging and multiple mold repair.

6. On the premise of ensuring the product quality, the use of lower clamping force for molding will help extend the life of the mold, facilitate the rapid filling of the mold, and help save energy.

7. Do a good job in mold maintenance to ensure effective heating and cooling channel conditions.

4、 Peripheral equipment

1. Select the auxiliary equipment suitable for the capacity, which can meet the work requirements without excessive surplus.

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 product quality, resulting in increased energy consumption.

3. Optimize the cooperation and operation sequence between the host and 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 systems, which can achieve significant energy conservation.

6. Use rapid mold change equipment to reduce the waiting time required for product switching in production.

5、 Material

Different materials consume different energy in processing, and poor management of materials or improper management of recycled materials will lead to increased production energy consumption.

1. On the premise of meeting the product performance, materials with lower processing energy consumption shall be preferred.

2. Under the condition of satisfying the optimization of service performance and cost, high liquidity materials are preferred.

3. Note that materials from different suppliers may have different process conditions.

4. The materials should be dried and used as they are dried to avoid energy waste when the materials become damp after drying.

5. Keep the materials well to prevent the materials from mixing with impurities or foreign matters, which will eventually lead to defective products.

6. It is allowed to add some recycled materials to some products, but attention should be paid to the preservation and cleanliness of recycled materials to avoid defective parts due to unclean materials.

6、 Processing technology

1. On the premise of meeting the product performance, use the shortest molding cycle.

2. If there is no special factor, the processing technology recommended by the supplier shall be used as far as possible.

3. Save all stable equipment and process parameters for specific products and molds to shorten the machine adjustment time during the next production change.

4. Optimize the process, adopt lower clamping force, shorter cooling time and pressure holding time.

7、 Adopt new technology

1. Adopt auxiliary molding technology, such as gas assisted, liquid assisted, steam assisted, micro foaming injection molding technology, etc.

2. Unitized forming scheme is adopted to reduce intermediate links.

3. New technologies such as in mold welding, in mold spraying, in mold assembly, and in mold decoration are adopted.

4. New low-pressure molding technology is adopted to shorten the molding cycle and reduce the melt temperature.

5. Energy regeneration system is adopted.

8、 Production management

1. One time production of high-quality products, reducing the defective rate is the largest energy saving.

2. The maintenance of the whole production system is closely related to energy consumption. This involves not only the host machine, but also the surrounding and factory equipment. For example, if the mold change crane in the workshop fails and requires manual mold change, the waiting time of the equipment will be prolonged, resulting in increased energy consumption of the equipment.

3. The workshop energy consumption monitoring system is equipped to facilitate the purposeful implementation of energy analysis and improvement by enterprises.

4. When the equipment is shut down for maintenance, not only the maintenance contents and items of the equipment itself should be checked, but also the condition of the connection between the equipment and other systems, and whether the working performance is reliable.

5. Compare with the industry benchmark regularly to see if there is room for further improvement.

6. Establishing a reliable contract and cooperative relationship with suppliers is beneficial to the energy conservation management of enterprises.