You can forgive blender makers if they feel a little shaken by all the demands placed on them. Helping their customers manage costs, difficult materials, even plant layout and aesthetics can be a challenge, but a number of OEMs have accepted the challenge, as Ampacet, Conair, Maguire and Mixaco recently have added to their product mix.
In a recent webinar hosted by Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing, Ampacet commercial director Doug Brownfield laid out his customers’ needs:
“Enhance uptime and production efficiency. Time is money, and we must run 24/7 with little downtime, reduce scrap, enhance quality control. Your blends must be correct with no contamination.”
Both Brownfield and Alan Landers, blending product manager for Conair, observed that companies are under pressure to use more recycled or reground materials. Such materials might pose their own challenges: They can be dusty and don’t necessarily flow well, and the processors that use them have to be cognizant that they maintain the right real-time ratios of recycled-to-virgin material.
“A lot of processors are using regrinds. They’re using post-consumer scrap. And that’s becoming more popular today through some types of regulations in some cases, or companies are just trying to use less-expensive recycled materials to lower the cost of their products,” Landers said.
Ampacet expands into blending with LIAD
Once known as a masterbatch specialist, Ampacet expanded its reach more than a year ago with its acquisition of LIAD, a manufacturer of feeders, blenders and other equipment. With LIAD’s expertise and experience in the market, Ampacet has made a splash with a raft of recent product announcements, including the introduction of LIAD Smart BlendSave.
As the business development manager for CISystems/LIAD Smart, which distributes LIAD products, Vince Paskie described one trend he has seen among customers: “Most customers today want the flexibility to have any machine run any material. And the way it’s done today is with manual manifold stations, and operators must go and select the right hose to the right product.”
But that system, with conveying lines carrying materials all over the plant, is both unsightly and a prescription for error, especially considering the challenges companies have encountered finding experienced employees.
The gravimetric BlendSave centralizes all blending and conveying activities around a large, funnel-shaped manifold called an OctoBatch. Available in a range of sizes, the OctoBatch automatically weighs ingredients independently and feeds them to a circular array of buffer hoppers. Depending on its size, the OctoBatch can accommodate up to 40 individual weighing chambers, fed directly from silos or containers. These dedicated lines can serve as many as 50 injection molding machines or extruders with a potential throughput of 13,200 pounds per hour and an accuracy to within 0.1 gram.
The modular, automated system provides complete traceability and eliminates the possibility of operator error and contamination.
“With today’s typical batch blenders, they’re set for a limited number of materials. Most batch monitors on the market are either a four-component or a six-component,” Paskie said. “So, what does that mean? It means, typically, whenever the customer needs to change to a different material, they’re going to have to drain, they’re going to have to clean out and then they’re going to have to refill in order to use more materials.”
In contrast, the BlendSave cuts down on the need for mezzanine structures and multiple vacuum receivers for each processing machine. This simplifies not only the blending process itself, but the layout and logistics of the plant, making it more efficient. The setup can be installed in new factories or deployed alongside traditional systems, as some customers already have opted to do, according to Brownfield.
Eventually, BlendSave could make the traditional systems obsolete, he and Paskie said. According to Ampacet, it could pay for itself in one year.
“We can also tie into the customer’s ERP system, and then go with the true lights-out automation as well. So, it can either be set up so that there’s an operator panel where the operator says ‘OK, this machine is going to be running this recipe.’ However, you can also tie it into the ERP system, as well, and then it’s truly a lights-out system,” Paskie said.
Conair upgrades TrueBlend line
Accuracy and an improved user experience are at the heart of Conair’s latest upgrades to its TrueBlend gravimetric blenders, which now come with the company’s next-generation SB-5 control, accessible through an enlarged, 7-inch color touch-screen display.
Designed to be user-friendly, the control is easier to program, displays intuitive graphics and provides more comprehensive monitoring. It performs on Conair’s common control interface, meaning the user experience is the same whether the user is accessing information about a blender or any other Conair equipment, such as a dryer. This simplifies operations and reduces the need for training.
“Conair has standardized a look and feel of all their software user interfaces, so that an operator can move from, say, a conveying system control to a dryer, to a TCU or to a blender and have everything navigate the same way. The colors are the same; navigation is very similar,” Landers said during the virtual Conair Summit 2021.
With Conair’s feed-forward dosing algorithm, the TrueBlend blenders deliver a dosing accuracy to within 0.025 percent for the total batch dispensed. Instead of dispensing each ingredient in one dose and adjusting for discrepancies in subsequent batches, they incrementally dispense each batch, continuously weighing material and adding a little bit more until the target weight is reached.
The control can manage up to 12 ingredients, dispensed from 12 material bins. The operator simply uses the touch screen to identify material types — even regrind, which can be added to the recipe and adjusted throughout the process as a percentage of the total batch size.
The SB-5 blender control also includes a self-loading option, enabling users to add vacuum receivers and up to 12 loaders, as well as one pump per blender.
Maguire's new bridge-breaker
A new pneumatically operated device that rapidly pulses in a clockwise, then counter-clockwise, motion can break up materials, such as regrind, that tend to clump together during the blending process.
Maguire’s bridge-breaker consists of an insert that pushes material directly into the dispensing valve, along with a rotary device that operates automatically as long as the valve is open. It can be deployed in a hopper of a new or existing gravimetric blender to ensure accurate dosing of regrind, recycled plastics or other troublesome ingredients.
Frank Kavanagh, VP of sales and marketing, said the two-phase approach employing an insert and rotary device is new for Maguire, which has designed several other bridge breakers over the years. The technology works with the company’s three largest blenders, with capacities of up to 12 ingredients and throughputs of up to 11,000 pounds per hour.
“These bigger blenders address the growing need for introducing post-consumer recyclate (PCR), which is often a major component in the raw material recipe being blended. PCR may account for 30 to 60 percent of the blend, and sometimes a higher percentage,” Kavanagh said. “PCR is often a light-bulk-density material, which does not flow as easily as other ingredients, tending to agglomerate or bridge. Often, too, the material properties of PCR may vary from supplier to supplier. Because bridging disrupts flow, it is an especially costly problem in high-volume extrusion.”
Maguire developed the bridge breaker to help a customer solve a problem with trim scrap, and he said it has worked well.
“Material flow is measured by weight over time. With the new bridge-breaker, we’ve been able to consistently dispense bridging-prone materials at the same weight over time in batch after batch,” Kavanagh said.
Mixaco HM Lab handles many materials
Designed for R&D applications, Mixaco’s HM Lab mixer can be used by compounders to provide either a gentle homogenized blend or a high-intensity vortex. It can handle a variety of materials, including colorants and thermoplastics, such as PVC and resins used to make medical parts.
The mixer has a high-performance, 7.5-kilowatt motor that ensures optimal speed and torque. Vessels with capacities of 5, 10, 15 and 20 liters are available for use with the mixer; a quick coupling system makes swapping them out easy. The mixer is equipped with both a nozzle for liquid injection and a funnel for manual or automatic filling.
Mixaco provides wear-resistant mixing tools for each container size or can tailor them to the user’s needs. The two-stage tools guarantee gentle vortex homogenization; the three-stage tools, intensive vortex homogenization; and the four-stage tools provide high-friction vortex homogenization.
The mixer comes with a 7-inch touch-screen display and can communicate with the Industry 4.0 Mixaco Control Center.
According to Mixaco, the mixer is cost-efficient to operate and smaller than technologies that handle comparable batch sizes.
Karen Hanna, senior staff reporter
Contact:
Ampacet Corp., Tarrytown, N.Y., 914-631-6600, www.ampacet.com
Conair Group, Cranberry Township, Pa., 724-584-5500, www.conairgroup.com
Maguire Products Inc., Aston, Pa., 610-459-4300, www.maguire.com
Mixaco USA LLC, Greer, S.C., 864-331-2320, www.mixaco.com
Karen Hanna | Senior Staff Reporter
Senior Staff Reporter Karen Hanna covers injection molding, molds and tooling, processors, workforce and other topics, and writes features including In Other Words and Problem Solved for Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing, Plastics Recycling and The Journal of Blow Molding. She has more than 15 years of experience in daily and magazine journalism.
