What are the ways to increase production and reduce energy for injection molding machines?

Date:2020-07-07 09:05:00

A plastic bottle manufacturer and engineers from Chuangjuman Electromechanical said that their blow molding machine production has decreased and energy consumption is particularly high.
The sales engineer visited their factory with them and found that the blow molding machine uses a hydraulic motor to drive the extruder. Due to working continuously 24 hours a day, five days a week for 20 years, the efficiency of this hydraulic motor has decreased and the speed has slowed down.
Previously, it only took 10 seconds to squeeze out a plastic bottle, but now it takes 12 seconds. In addition, there are many plastic burrs that need to be processed or recycled, which consumes a lot of energy. If you buy a new injection molding machine, you will need to spend more cost to upgrade the power supply.
We conducted research with experts in energy automation and found that the energy consumption of some equipment was compared with that of a fully electric device, proving that producing plastic bottles of the same size and weight, the energy consumption of existing equipment is many times higher than that of fully electric equipment, and the electricity consumption is also astonishingly high because hydraulic motors require additional torque when starting.
In addition, the problem caused by the rotation speed of the old injection molding machine resulted in the shape of the injection molding being unqualified.
Previously, due to equipment instability and malfunctions, only 63% of the extruded material ended up in plastic bottles.

After experimentation, it was decided to replace the hydraulic motor in the blow molding machine because the efficiency of the old motor had decreased and the injection speed was slow. The new solution is ABB electric motor+ACS880 frequency converter.
The combination of ABB motors and ACS880 frequency converters can not only optimize power consumption, improve speed, quality, and stability of finished products, but also save some capacitance to power new injection molding machines.
Due to less plastic waste, the frequency of using the 18.5kW pellet machine for plastic recycling has decreased.
After ABB installation, operational data shows that up to 60% of energy has been saved. Even with the addition of modification costs, purchasing a 55kW electric motor can recoup the cost of the solution in less than a year.
Mr. Zhang, the manufacturer of plastic bottles, said to us that due to insufficient power supply, it is impossible to install new electric equipment. However, 60% of energy has been saved on the old injection molding machine, which greatly exceeds our expectations and can greatly improve productivity. The ABB motor+frequency converter solution is feasible!