Wilmington Machinery Delivers Another High Output Coextrusion Small Bottle(SB) Turnkey System Capable of over 2000 Lbs and 18,000 Bottles Per Hour
Wilmington,NC: Wilmington Machinery, a manufacturer of high speed rotary coextrusion blow molding systems and structural foam injection molding machinery, announces the shipment of another of its high output coextrusion SB (Small Bottle) turnkey systems.
This product line was introduced 2 years ago at NPE in Chicago and became an instant success due to the machine's simple operation, the high quality bottles produced, and overall value to the customer.
The latest machine is a 50 cavity, 6 layer HDPE coextrusion system capable of more than 2000 lbs hour and 18,000 bottles per hour depending upon the size. It was supplied with multiple sets of molds, bottle conveying and de-moiling. The machine illustrated has a 1.5 ton clamp to accept bottles from 250 to 500 ml.
The breakthrough in technology for Wilmington Machinery SB blow molders came in a combination of proprietary developments in mold design, bottle handling, high speed parison extrusion methods and processing. "Once all the pieces are put together correctly, the SB technology is deceivingly simple," comments Jeff Newman.
Single Parison Design: Why It's Significant
The Wilmington Machinery SB technology is the only high output rotary blow molding machine that utilizes a single parison, single cavity process to produce single serve multilayer 80 ml to 500 ml containers for dairy, juice, food and liquid yogurt applications in very large quantities. "The SB addresses many processing issues associated with blow container neck to neck or neck to tail on other wheel, shuttle and reciprocating blow equipment," notes Jeff Newman, Vice President of Sales and Marketing.
Other machinery manufactures use a neck-to-neck or neck-to-tail tandem cavity configuration. For ultra-light weight or high performance containers, the difference in the tandem bottles from top to bottom cannot be tolerated. Wilmington's SB single cavity system guarantees every bottle is identical. That means better material distribution, much smaller gram weight variation, better performance in the filling operation and lower cost.
The SB system utilizes Wilmington's mechanical cam actuated modular clamp design and is sized to match the container size with either a 1 or 1.5 ton model with various mold sizes for different bottles. As with all of Wilmington Machinery wheel systems, SB machines are sized to match production demand with 18 to 60 cavities or more. The wheel speeds are designed to accommodate the estimated cycle time which can be a little as 6 seconds for light weight dairy / juice / yogurt containers.
Unique to Wilmington's SB: The Extrusion System- Dieheads and Molds
The extrusion systems utilize high performance electric drives and are configured to meet individual customer requirements.
The single parison dieheads are Wilmington's proprietary design to accommodate the very high output requirements. The diehead tooling is also specially designed for SB technology and provides a unique system for adjusting the positioning of the tooling while in operation. This positioning is very critical to maintain proper wall balance for the SB process. Wall thickness vertically on the bottles is controlled by an extremely high speed parison programmer
The mold design required the most development. Unlike any other wheel molds, these require no cut of knives and no bottle knockout system making them extremely simple and less expensive. "It is one of those things that once you see how simple it is, you have to ask why somebody didn't invent this years ago," says Newman. Yet other unique feature of the SB system is the size of the molds. They are small and lightweight. Installation and removal is a simple one-person task requiring no bulky lifting tables, hoist systems or complex guidance fixtures as required on other blow molders, again saving time and labor.
The proprietary mold design has another hidden advantage in eliminates the complexity of getting bottles out of the mold and to the trimmer. Bulk conveying of the bottles is utilized to an unscrambler which uprights the bottles in single file for transport to the spin trimmer. The bulk conveyor eliminates many of the problems associated with wheel bottle handling, especially at these very high production speeds.
Electrical Savings: Makes Wilmington Machinery's SB Systems More Economical to Operate
The rotary blow molded machine is all electric and more economical to operate compared to a hydraulically operated shuttle or reciprocating screw machine. In addition, Wilmington Machinery's SB Blow Molding System has the potential to reduce the amount of hot flash (and therefore the extrusion rate including utility savings) by as much a 33% compared to other extrusion blow molding processes. Plus, the single SB rotary blowmolder is driven by a small electrical motor as compared to the large motors required on the inefficient hydraulic pumps on most shuttles and recip blow molders. The SB system can generate energy savings of $35,000 to $75,000 per year when these factors are combined.
"Today our focus is on both high performance multi-layer bottles and mono-layer bottles for liquid yogurt and dairy says Newman. The international yogurt markets are huge and require very high speed machinery. The weights of the bottles continue to be reduced making the containers more difficult to produce especially with the tighter specifications that customers are demanding. Wilmington's single parison, single cavity SB technology gives the processor a clear advantage over his competition still using shuttle and reciprocating machinery".
For more information contact:
Jeff Newman
Wilmington Machinery
4628 Northchase Parkway NE
Wilmington, NC 28405
910.452.5090
Email: jnewman@wilmingtonmachinery.com
Be sure to visit:www.wilmingtonmachinery.com
Nanette Gregory
J4 Communications
407-432-7706
