PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2018

TRADE SHOW PREVIEW PET planet Insider Vol. 19 No. 05/18 www.petpla.net 62 Injection stretch blow-moulding technology for a variety of bottles Full-blown bottles With the development of the single-stage injection-stretch blow moulding machine Blow- liner, the plastics specialist Mould & Matic from Austria, a Kiefel subsidiary company, has opened up a new market. Although they were newcomers to the blow-moulding industry, success has not been slow. Honey, ketchup, detergent bottles, cosmetic and pill packaging or baby bottles - the product variants that are created on the Blowliner are just as diverse as their design. Bernhard Hornhuber, sales man- ager for blow-moulding technology, about the Blowliner: “Customers really appreciate the fact that they get the complete line - from granulate to packaging - from a single source.” The machine is available in three sizes. The bestseller is the Blowliner Medium with a material throughput of up to 130kg PET per hour. Like its smaller and larger siblings, it also pro- cesses PET, PP and HDPE. Thanks to its intelligent concept, it can be upgraded to multi-layer applications at any time. Above all, the premium sector, which attaches great impor- tance to the high quality and trans- parency of packaging, and where the quantities are between three and 20 million, values the 1-stage system. Hornhuber gets to the heart of the reasons: “Our clients produce sophis- ticated packaging. They must meet high quality requirements regard- ing transparency and dimensional accuracy. Most customers produce medium quantities and they want the exibility to produce different contain- ers with volumes between 10ml and 5l on the same machine. The Blowliner fulls all of these wishes and thus contributes to sustainable high plant utilisation at our customers.” But how does the system meet the requirements of the market? A closer look at the design of the Blowliner reveals the answer. The injection moulding unit is at the beginning of the linear machine. This is a vertical hydraulic Engel machine with up to 4,000kN clamping force and a clamp- ing surface of up to 800 x 1000mm - depending on the size of the system. The plasticising unit processes PET, PP and HDPE. Here the preforms are created; depending on the product, these range from eight to 64 cavities. Each machine can be upgraded with a unit for the production of multi-layer preforms. This permits production of preforms made of PP with barrier layers of EVOH or PET with PA. Still warm, they are removed by a linear robot with a gripping mandrel and the preforms are transferred to the stretch-blow unit with a clamping force of up to 400kN. The machine works with one to four-rows blow tools that accept preforms with diameters from 10 to 150mm. Each series of cavi- ties has its own pre- and main blow valve so that the pre- and main blow pressures can be set individually. This makes it possible to run different prod- uct variants on one tool. The entire stretch-blow unit has servo motor drives that provide exact repeatability, Blowliner product samples Bernhard Hornhuber, Area Sales Manager Blow Moulding, Mould & Matic Solutions GmbH West Hall 2727