Foam party: ENGEL UK hosts MuCell seminar

ENGEL UK has welcomed some 230 plastics processing professionals to its premises in Warwick for a special seminal on foam injection moulding with MuCell technology.

The two-day event, which was hosted by the Austrian plastics juggernaut in collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover, is reported as one of the best-attended on the matter in ENGEL's history.

Together, the companies demonstrated the potential that this technology has for carmakers and their suppliers.

"MuCell offers the opportunity of combining resource-efficient lightweight design with a high degree of cost efficiency and excellent component properties," said Graeme Herlihy, the CEO of ENGEL UK.

"This combination will ensure that the process continues to rapidly gain importance."

Under the ENGEL foammelt banner, ENGEL offers single source production cells for MuCell structural foam moulding. ENGEL imports MuCell systems from Trexel, US, for its customers, handling control and safety integration with the injection moulding machine, and offering application-specific consulting. This makes implementing the technology really easy.

Seas of potential

Among the keynote topics at the event were: MuCell-compliant component design, filling simulations, creating premium surfaces in the MuCell process, and the cost-efficiency of the

process. Michael Fischer from ENGEL AUSTRIA, Harald Heitkamp from Trexel and Fabien Buchy from Mouldex3D presented innovative solutions and offered a sneak preview of future challenges and developments. Ian Ray from Jaguar Land Rover and Dominique Manceau from Plastivaloire in France reported on the potential for their products.

The keynotes clearly illustrated how structural foam injection moulding transcends the limits of compact injection moulding and opens up new degrees of design freedom.

Components produced in structural foam injection moulding have proven to be highly dimensionally stable, and are free of sink marks. Because foaming enhances the flow properties of the melt, even challenging geometries with undercuts are completely filled. At the same time, foaming reduces the material use and the component weight – by up to 20 per cent for the product examples on show.

Dual technology demos

In a live demonstration at the technology centre, ENGEL took up one of the latest trends: the combination of MuCell with other process technologies. To manufacture ready-to-use components in high-gloss piano black, both ENGEL foammelt and ENGEL variomelt for vario-thermal mould temperature control were integrated with an ENGEL e‑victory 120 injection moulding machine with an integrated ENGEL viper 6 robot. Sample parts were injected during the event. Among other applications, this dual technology integration opens up new efficiency and quality horizons for interior applications. 

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