To save energy in the injection molding factory, it is important for product managers and engineers of an industrial manufacturer with this process account 60%.

With their continuous improvement on technology that saves resources like electricity or natural gas used during manufacturing processes; reducing overall power consumption will be achieved by implementing new technologies throughout all areas where they are needed most – from producing goods right down to distribution channels.

Production plant

The layout of the production plant focuses on two aspects: to meet the production demand conditions, according to the production process to optimize the layout at the same time, and to meet the requirements of flexible energy use under specific production conditions.

1. Power supply, to meet the stable production of the required power at the same time there is an appropriate margin, not too much surplus caused by excessive reactive energy consumption.

2. Construction of efficient cooling water circulation facilities, equipped with effective insulation and thermal insulation system for the cooling water system.

3. Optimize the overall production layout of the workshop. A lot of production has successive processes with reasonable coordination that can reduce the time and energy required for turnover and improve production efficiency.

4. To lighting and other plant equipment as far as possible to consider the most effective small unit for separate control.

5. Do regular maintenance of workshop equipment to avoid damage to utilities, which affects the normal operation of production and thus causes increased energy consumption.

Injection Molding Machine

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

1. Choose the right injection molding machine according to the characteristics of the products. The “big horse-drawn cart” type of injection molding process often means a lot of energy waste.

2. The use of an all-electric injection molding machine and hybrid injection molding machine, with excellent energy-saving effect, can save 20-80%.

3. The use of new heating technology, such as electromagnetic induction heating, infrared heating, etc., can achieve 20-70% heating energy savings.

4. Adopt effective heat insulation measures for heating and cooling systems to reduce heat and cold loss.

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

6. Choose low compression hydraulic oil to reduce the waste of energy for hydraulic system work.

7. The use of parallel action, multi-cavity injection, multi-component injection molding, and other processing technologies can significantly save energy.

8. The traditional mechanical hydraulic injection molding machine also has a variety of energy-saving drive systems, instead of the traditional quantitative pump mechanical hydraulic injection molding machine’s energy-saving effect is significant.

9. Regular maintenance of heating and cooling pipes, to ensure that the internal pipeline without impurities, scale blockage, and other phenomena occur, 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 processed, such as PVC processing often requires the use of special screws.

Injection Molding Tooling

Mold structure and mold condition often have a significant impact on the injection molding cycle 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. The use of hot runner mold, not only can save materials and reduce the energy consumption of material recycling, but its molding process itself also has a significant energy-saving effect.

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

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

5. Adopting CAE-aided design technology for injection mold design, mold flow analysis, and simulation can reduce the energy consumption of mold debugging and multiple mold repairs.

6. Under the premise of ensuring product quality, using lower clamping force for molding can help prolong mold life, facilitate mold filling quickly and help save energy.

7. Do a good job of mold maintenance to ensure effective heating and cooling water channel condition.

Peripheral equipment

1. Choose the auxiliary equipment with the suitable capacity to meet the work requirements and not too affluent.

2. Do a good job of equipment maintenance to ensure that the equipment is in normal working condition. Auxiliary equipment that does not work properly will cause unstable production or even poor quality of the parts, resulting in increased energy consumption.

3. Optimize the work and operation sequence of the host and peripheral equipment.

4. Optimize the mutual position of peripheral equipment and production equipment and make peripheral equipment as close to the host as possible without affecting the operating conditions.

5. Many auxiliary equipment manufacturers provide on-demand energy supply systems, which can achieve significant energy savings.

6. Use quick mold change equipment to reduce the waiting time needed to switch products in production.

Materials

Different materials consume different amounts of energy to process, while poor management of materials or improper management of recycled materials can cause increased energy consumption in production.

1. Under the premise of meeting the performance of the products, materials with lower processing energy consumption should be preferred.

2. Under the condition of satisfying the use performance and cost optimization, priority should be given to high fluidity materials.

3. Pay attention to different suppliers of materials that may have different process conditions.

4. Material drying treatment, it is best to dry with the use, to avoid drying the material back to moisture and waste energy.

5. Do a good job of material preservation, to prevent materials mixed with impurities or foreign objects, ultimately causing bad products.

6. Some products are allowed to add certain recycled materials, but attention should be paid to the preservation and cleanliness of recycled materials to avoid bad parts due to unclean materials.

Processing technology

1. Under the premise of meeting the performance of products, use the shortest molding cycle.
2. If there are no special factors, use the processing technology recommended by the supplier as far as possible.
3. Save all stable equipment and process parameters for specific products and molds, to shorten the transfer time when changing production next time.
4. Optimize the process by using lower clamping force, shorter cooling time, and 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 painting, in-mold assembly, in-mold decoration, etc.

4. Adopt new low-pressure molding technology to shorten the molding cycle, and at the same time can reduce the melt temperature.

5. Adopt an energy regeneration system.

Production management

1. One-time production of high-quality products and the reduction of defective rates are the biggest energy saving.

2. The maintenance of the whole production system is closely related to energy consumption. This involves not only the host but also the peripheral and factory equipment.

For example, if the workshop injection mold changing crane fails and requires manpower to change the mold, it will inevitably prolong the equipment waiting time and cause the equipment energy consumption to increase.

3. Equipped with a workshop energy consumption monitoring system, it is easy for enterprises to implement energy analysis and improvement with purpose.