Carleen Kristensen and Rick Mahan of Hi-Tech Mold & Tool recently attended an intensive 3-day workshop at the corporate headquarters of Kautex Maschinenbau in Bonn, Germany. Their mission was to explore the benefits of that company’s unique suction blow molding technology.
Suction blow molding is a “coreless” process that makes it possible to mold a wide variety of tubular and conduit shapes with multiple bends at diverse angles but without the parting lines that can be a source of structural vulnerability. This technology has been adopted enthusiastically by the European automotive industry but only 5 machines have been installed in North America to date.
In Europe, the biggest application for the technology has been automobile air exchanges. What Rick and Carleen are most interested in is the possibility of adapting the technology to high temperature engineering resins to replace tubular metal components in aerospace, medical and other high-tech applications.
Carleen said, “One of the interesting benefits of this technology is the ability to incorporate dual durometer materials in multiple locations. So the tube can be stiff where resilience is most important, but flexible in areas where it would be desirable to bend for space conservation and efficient installation. We would add value to this process by applying our high-temperature expertise to manufacture plastic parts that could only be made of metal until now.”
The discussions that took place in Germany were very encouraging for both companies and Rick and Carleen will be returning to Kautex Maschinenbau in mid-July for one-on-one meetings with the technologists and deeper investigations including tests involving high temperature materials.
If you have questions about how suction blow molding might be used for your metal replacement application, get in touch with Rick or Carleen (using the contact form below) and they will bring it up with Kautex on their upcoming visit.
Hi-Tech-Talk 