Sankt Augustin, Germany -- After an extremely successful appearance at last year's JEC Composites, Hennecke GmbH says its experts "are curious about the upcoming edition of Europe's leading composites fair."
There is plenty of reason for this excitement as the machine manufacturer will be presenting two significant innovations in process engineering in spray technology, and integrated systems.
Hennecke said it has been documenting the growing interest in composites, with constant research and development and expansion of its product portfolio to identify new ways of producing and using composites.
At this year's JEC, Hennecke says visitors to its booth will be able to get an exclusive insight into a new engineering approach that responds to the growing requirements regarding efficiency and environment in the automotive sector.
This is the manufacture of fibre-reinforced structural components in a high-pressure RTM process (HP-RTM). In contrast to classic RTM, this new technology enables the reactive mix to be injected rapidly into the cavity, giving extremely short curing times and guaranteeing optimised cycle times.
And, the PU equipment specialist will also present what it calls "another trend-setting innovation," to allow use of fillers in reactive PU mixtures.
Fillers are traditionally processed in high-pressure metering systems in a batch method where the filler is added to one component before all the components are mixed. However, this means that machine parts must to be configured in such a way that they are resistant to high wear and tear.
To process abrasive fillers such as barium sulphate, different metering pumps and mixheads have to be used. Also, it is sometimes difficult to overcome the hurdle posed by the size and sensitivity of the filler particles.
A groundbreaking innovation that Hennecke says "arose from close cooperation with Bayer Material Science," allows fillers to be fed in a stream of gas and injected into the mixing chamber during the mixing phase. This is dubbed Solid Injection by Airstream (SIA) technology.
Hennecke says the approach opens up completely new fields of application to processors and means that fillers which up previously unthinkable can be used in PU high-pressure mixing - from expanded graphite to hollow glass spheres.
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