Saturday, January 11, 2014

The Work Of Custom Thermoforming Companies

By Marissa Velazquez


Custom thermoforming is a process in which plastics are manufactured to come up with useful products. The procedure includes burning plastic sheets to very high temperatures so as to make certain forms and then sliced to come up with the required shape. High temperatures are used by custom thermoforming companies in order to enable the sheets to be molded and cooled to the wanted look of the final product.

Apart from plastic thermoforming or custom thermoforming, the process is also referred with other industry terminologies. The process is also referred as vacuum forming or pressure forming, which still share the same process with plastic forming. The process follows a similar criterion and uses three basic factors; heat, pressure and vacuum.

Many companies use high speed, computer controlled and in-line custom machinery. The process also involves using temperature and humidity controlled environment for manufacturing. These factors are put in place to ensure rhythmic repeatability, which aids production of high quality products for packaging.

It is recommended that custom thermo-formers should be purchased from the same manufacturer. This is done to improve the efficiency of the equipment while also reducing the cost of purchase and maintenance. This also ensured through minimized inventory of spare parts, standardized tooling, skill set, and improved familiarity of the technical staff.

Standardized tooling, in particular, can also be used to aid the manufacturing process by enhancing the changeover of the tooling. This also promotes shorter and profitable runs. In order to ensure efficiency, the equipment should meet certain qualities. For instance, it should have high level setting of various functioning parts.

The most fundamental form of the process is when you use a small top of a table sized machine to burn the minute pieces of plastic sheets then enlarge them using vacuum. This method is majorly used when making samples. On the contrary, there is also a more complex method whereby enormous machines are used for heating and transforming the sheets of plastic . The resulting pieces are then sliced consistently and under very high speed. In this method there is a notably higher amount of finished goods compared to the simple method. The mass of production is largely dependent on the size of each mold, machine and the number of parts being formed.

The two common forms of thermoforming include the thick gauge and thin gauge processes. The former is mainly used for production of retail industry, food and medical products. On the other hand, the latter is used for the manufacturing of refrigerator liners, ballets, car doors, and dash panels, among others.

In the high-volume method, an extruder or roll feeds plastic films into a series of chains that pierce the sheets using the spikes or pins that are on the chains. The spikes also move the sheets to an oven where they are heated to the suitable temperatures. They are then taken to a form center where a mating mold and pressure-box close on the sheet then a vacuum is applied to eliminate all the gases trapped and also pull the material onto the mold together with pressured air. This will shape the plastic to the exact appearance of the mold. Most custom thermoforming companies try to produce exactly what the client needs.




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