Thermoforming.

The buzz at the show was about catalytic gas heating, which has generated considerable enthusiasm over claims of big energy savings but also some skepticism about its universal applicability. A new supplier of catalytic heaters emerged at the show, as did additional details about a few new or upgraded machines and control systems.

CATALYTIC HEAT STARS

Vulcan Catalytic Systems, Portsmouth, R.I., the leading U.S. supplier of flameless catalytic heating systems to thermoformers, had its own booth as well as a display in the booth of Lyle Industries, Inc., Beaverton, Mich., which has sold two machines with catalytic heaters. A sign in the Lyle booth claimed that $10 worth of energy will operate electric heaters for 98 hr and catalytic gas heaters for 385 hr. Vulcan managing director Michael Chapman says, "Our catalytic heaters can reduce energy costs by up to 80%, often resulting in payback within 10 months." Chapman says the average savings among Vulcan's 150 thermoforming installations is $1000/month.

Vulcan catalytic heaters were also shown operating on an M1300EP single-station machine from Brown Machine Div. of John Brown Inc., Beaverton, Mich., and on a Model 900 continuous pressure former from Zed Industries, Vandalia, Ohio. Two other OEM exhibitors--Maac Machinery, Inc. of Itasca, Ill., and Sencorp Systems Inc. of Hyannis, Mass.--have customers using or presently installing catalytic heaters.

A newcomer at NPE was Teknicat Ltd., an Irish firm that makes catalytic gas heaters. Its U.S. representative is Technical Catalytic Services, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., a new engineering firm that specializes in thermoforming equipment conversions and computer control of catalytic heating.

Energy-cost savings are also possible with electric heaters, according to Z.M.D. International, Inc., Paramount, Calif. The company showed an HD-333 large single-station vacuum former with new energy-management software that's said to cut energy costs 40-60%. It accomplishes this by staggering the heater cycles so they don't all turn on and off at once. That way, peak load is no more than 25 amps out of a theoretical maximum of 100 amps for this machine.

NEW & UPDATED MACHINES

Cannon Shelley of the U.K., represented here by Cannon U.S.A., Mars, Pa., has a cooperative agreement with German twinsheet forming specialist Hombach and has incorporated Hombach's technical innovations into a line of twin-sheet machines. These are offered together with tooling and processing know-how.

In addition, Cannon Shelley has come out with the new Linearform continuous, in-line, sheet-fed machine for making refrigerator liners. Cavity liners of 150-mil ABS can be formed at 110 pieces/hr and door liners of 66 mils run at 150/hr. The system is said to be unusually compact and fully automated, with one-button recall of stored heater programs. Product changeover reportedly takes 15 min.

Brown Machine has redesigned its 2025 continuous former. All hydraulics have been eliminated in favor of an air-driven mechanical wedge that can provide 100 tons of trim force. The forming station now has redesigned limit switches and centralized pneumatic valves for simpler operator adjustments. The revised oven has a counterbalanced clamshell design and single-point adjustment that shortens setup time. Now the operator can move just one level to adjust the oven for different mold lengths, say Brown officials. Adjustments that used to take 30 min now reportedly take only 30 sec. Also, a new fence guard is said to reduce tool-change and maintenance times.

A newly upgraded Series 2500 continuous former from Sencorp Systems was shown with a new pendant-mounted touchscreen control, quick-change apparatus for 30-min tool changes, hang-hole cleanout station with vacuum take-away, and a faster push-off station that can also act as a stacker.

Kiefel Systems, Succasunna, N.J., says its new KL 52 BFS cut-in-place continuous pressure former can tackle sophisticated jobs at modest cost using steel-rule dies and a secondary stacking station. For hard-to-cut products such as 6-mil APET candy trays, the hydromechanical platen drive provides a precise "kiss" cut against mechanical stops. This allows use of a hardened striker plate that does not develop wear grooves.

Another "difficult" product made with steel-rule dies on this machine is PP lids. Special tooling action retracts part of the mold to free the undercut before trimming--which is reportedly less troublesome than the more usual approach of trimming before releasing the undercut.

Also employing steel-rule dies is the newly updated RDKP 72d pressure former with servo-driven indexing, forming, and trimming from Adolf Illig Maschinenbau GmbH of Germany (which has several distributors here). One new feature is precise motorized adjustment in x-y directions of cutting-die position.

NEW CONTROLS

Also shown by Kiefel Systems was the FTARS heater-monitoring system. A row of infrared pyrometers across the web "reads" the sheet temperature just after it leaves the oven while an encoder device monitors sheet travel. The CRT display shows the temperature profile of the entire sheet at once. It appears as a 2-D grid of color-coded rectangles with numerical temperature data in each rectangle. A self-regulating version with closed-loop control has been developed for automotive use.

A touchscreen display hung on a pendant with a swivel mount is a new alternative to floor-standing a separate control cabinet on thermoformers from Sencorp Systems. The Sentroller III control offers English or metric units and a choice of three languages at a single touch. It displays set and actual temperatures for each oven zone, plus upper and lower control limits. A timing/velocity display shows set and actual values for all machine actions in a cycle, allowing the operator to adjust flow-control valves until the two overlap. A "zoom" feature provides close-up focus on short intervals of a cycle.

Other Sentroller III features include management reports that summarize production to date, time left to run, average cycle time, feet and pounds of sheet used, and production costs to date (based on input factors such as material cost and overhead cost/hr). The system logs all setpoint changes, downtime occurrences, and other "events" over a 10-day period. Downtime can be analyzed with the aid of a Pareto chart that correlates downtime causes with amount of downtime experienced for each cause.