Machinery News

New technology for lighter parts

In a bid to make injection moulding more competitive than thermoforming, Canada-based StackTeck has introduced a patent-pending technology for producing 20-40% lighter parts.

Trim (Thin Recess Injection Moulding) uses an advanced approach to part design to enable thinning out of the wall section unlike the conventional approach used for thinwall packaging moulded from polyolefins with high melt flow indexes. According to Randy Yakimishyn, President of StackTeck, the technology maintains key functional features such as the tamper evident rim on a container and high top load compression strength.

Conventional thinwall part design normally has a maximum L/T ratio of 300 (ie. ratio of flow length to average wall thickness). Using Trim, it has been demonstrated that large areas of a 32 oz. rectangular container can be thinned out to an L/T ratio of over 500. The container had a flow length of 5.74 in. and with thin recess areas covering half of the part’s side wall and bottom, a thin panel thickness of 0.011 in. was achieved. Normal injection speed and pressure used to fill the part and it is expected that thinwall moulders can adopt this technology using existing injection moulding machines. A fill time of 0.2 seconds was achieved at a moderate fill pressure using a 35 MFI PP supplied by Basell.

Trim is being showcased on StackTeck’s IML pilot cell at its facility just north of Toronto International Airport. The IML pilot cell is a joint effort by StackTeck, Netstal and CBW to provide a prototyping and pilot programme for IML applications.