In a Q&A session, Composites in Manufacturing hears the view of Peter Egger, Engel’s division manager at its centre for lightweight composite technologies, Austria.
- Q) Does lightweight automotive composite part manufacture represent a huge opportunity for the injection moulding industry?
Sustainable mobility - electric mobility is unthinkable without lightweight construction. We’re still at the very beginning on this topic, and the potential is huge. Automotive lightweight construction is one of the most important drivers of growth, particularly in the plastics and injection moulding industries. Plastics are inherently a lightweight construction material, and injection moulding is the perfect technology to combine lightweight construction with cost efficiency. Injection moulding enables a high degree of process integration, which in its turn enables economic industrialisation processes.
- Q) What is Engel’s role in all this?
Engel has many years of experience in injection moulding and the automation of injection moulding processes, which are essential success factors for the cost-efficient production of large quantities of FRP components. At our Centre for Lightweight Composite Technologies in St. Valentin, Austria, we are collaborating with customers, partners and research institutions to accelerate the industrialisation of new processes. Together, we have set notable milestones already and will continue to do so. In the worldwide automotive industry, Engel is rated as one of the leading development partners.
- Q) What kinds of technology demands is Engel having to overcome?
Generally, the challenge lies in developing new processes for automotive serial production that achieve the cost efficiency required in the industry. We’ve come a long way in certain areas and have developed several promising technologies to the point of series-production readiness. We’d like to see the automotive industry developing trust in the new technologies more rapidly – it’s another challenge we face! We’re in danger of a 6°C rise in global temperature by the year 2050. In Asian metropolitan areas, people are frequently forced to wear respiratory protection. All of this emphasises the urgency of the situation, and it’s undisputed that plastics and injection moulding are making a huge contribution to a more sustainable mobility. In collaboration with the automotive manufacturers, we would like to achieve more rapid progress in this area.
The technological challenges that we’re dealing with include recycling, the keyword being circular economy. It is our goal to advance thermoplastic composite solutions even more emphatically because they’re key to reintroducing production waste and end-of-life components into the material cycle. Another topic is the construction of composite components while taking into account the manufacturing process – this is far from being the standard. It depends on the correct design of the layer structure and fibre orientation in the component so as to provide the required stiffness at the appropriate points. In special processes such as these, simulation tools can only provide limited help; there’s still room for improvement in this area.
- Q) Tell us about the Engel 130 vertical insert machine, and also the Warwick ACRC’s Engel v-duo 1,700 tonne vertical injection moulding machine?
In order to develop solutions for our customers that are tailored precisely to the individual requirements, Engel offers a broad spectrum of machine construction types and drive technologies. Working with insert components and preforms, machines with a vertical clamping unit provide benefits in many applications. Engel offers two series in this segment, the
v-duo and the
insert.
The Engel v-duo is designed for fibre composite applications and offers a clear-cut approach to economical series production for thermoplastic as well as thermoset composites. In contrast to presses traditionally used for fibre composite applications, the v-duo stands out with its small footprint. Machine height and weight are significantly lower, reducing the overhead for building foundations. The clamping unit can be accessed from all four sides instead of just two. It features a high degree of rigidity and excellent mould fixing platen parallelism. The regulation of platen parallelism for injection compressing moulding is included in the standard version of the machine. Since the v-duo completely dispenses with hydraulic accumulators and already uses Engel’s servo-hydraulic system, ecodrive, in its standard version, it sets new standards in terms of energy efficiency for large-scale machines.
In its vertical edition, the insert machine is used for smaller components in the composite industry. It offers advantages even when manual work steps are required. The clamping unit is even more accessible in the new design. Both machines are equipped with a CC300 control, which is the central unit for monitoring and controlling the overall process in integrated and automated system solutions.
- Q) What strategic partnerships have you formed with UK companies and academia?
There are two very interesting examples we’re able to discuss. First, the collaboration with the WMG’s Automotive Composite Research Centre at the University of Warwick. The Engel
v-duo enables them to research thermoset composites prepreg compression moulding, sheet moulding compound compression moulding, HP RTM and stamp-forming of thermoplastic composites. Second, there’s another lab machine working at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in Bristol.
- Q) What productivity benefits and synergies can companies enjoy from the successful implementation and use of robotics automation technology?
For the solutions we’re developing together with our partners, automation is always an integrated part of the manufacturing process. Automation, as well as process integration play a key role in the industrialisation of innovative processing methods. The goal is to integrate all process steps from the raw material to the ready-to-fit component into one automated manufacturing cell.
Costs are not the main issue in automation. In fact, automation is an integral part of the process and key to enabling certain products and product characteristics. Automation leads to more stable processes, as well as higher and more consistent quality.
- Q) How well can robotic automation align itself to the growing influence Industry 4.0 and the smart factory philosophy?
In our understanding, Industry 4.0 doesn’t equate with a higher degree of automation. It relies on the networking of production systems, the systematic use of machine, process and production data and the use of intelligent assistance systems. The goal is the Smart Factory, in which production processes are continuously self-optimising. The processes and systems of the smart factory achieve significantly higher degrees of productivity, availability and quality than today's factories. In addition, the Smart Factory allows plastics processors to react flexibly to rapidly changing requirements.
In the Smart Factory, machines, robots, devices and applications communicate with each other, as well as with superordinate control systems such as MES and ERP. As a communication model, OPC UA is becoming more and more established as standard in the plastics industry.
Complete robot integration as offered by Engel with its viper and easix robots, as well as the CC300 control of its injection moulding machines, this has already enabled real-time communications with data transfer rates of less than 2ms. This is possible because rather than conducting communications via an interface, the robot control is run as a subsystem of the machine control with machine and robot both using the same database.
- Q) Do you think the UK composites manufacturing industry will ever meet similar production rates to those currently enjoyed by automotive companies processing traditional metallic car parts?
What counts is overall efficiency. The great strength of injection moulding lies in the integrability of processes. If I can form and functionalise composite components in a single work step and can take raw materials to assembly-ready vehicle components in one step, the overall manufacturing process may be significantly more efficient and faster than the process chain for manufacturing comparable metal components. We’re dealing with completely different processes when it comes to composites. If we take that into account, then we will partly achieve competitive overall cycles times and production rates.
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