tachytherm mold logo spectrum web.jpg                  Ultra-fast cycling molds for plastic processing

Home

About us

Applications

Products

Services

Contact

 

Applications

In theroy, any mold will run faster as a Tachythermtm mold, and we encourage you to consider a Tachythermtm mold to lower your costs by reducing molding cycle time. In Practice, however, certain applications are particularly well suited to benefit from the Tachythermtm advantages. These include:

·       Cycled temperature molding
Cycled temperature molding is known by many names, including variothermTM, RTC, ATT, and RHCM. It involves alternately heating the mold (during injection), and then cooling the mold (during the cooling phase). This technique is particularly useful in micro-molding and molding of extremely thin-walled parts. If can also be used for parts with long flow paths, as a simpler alternative to multi-gated or sequential valve gated molds. Fine surface finish and detail is attainable, even with filled resins.  This technique is also very useful for molding heat and shear sensitive materials (e.g. bioresins, acrylonitrile), as filling and packing the mold cavity at low melt temperature and mold temperature may be difficult, without shear-producing high injection pressure and speed. The cavity surface stays hot until it is filled and packed, but it rapidly cools once packing is complete. With a Tachythermtm mold, the entire mold need not be heated and cooled, but only the high thermal conductivity envelope surrounding the cavity. This enables faster cycle times.

·       Medical device molding
Medical devices often have unusually stringent dimensional and form requirements, despite their sometimes complex geometries. The uniformity of cooling in a Tachythermtm mold helps eliminate distortion, which is usually a result of uneven cooling, enabling very tight dimensional control.

·        Micro-embossing
Most embossing machines for micro-embossing applications (e.g. microfluidics), have heating and cooling means incorporated into the platen. This requires the entire platen and tool to be heated and cooled during the embossing cycle, which costs valuable manufacturing time. With a Tachythermtm mold, only the embossing tool is directly heated. This shortens cycle times and saves energy.

·       Micro-molding and thin-walled molding
When cycled temperature control is not used for micro-molding and thin-walled molding, the mold is typically run very hot, to allow the narrow mold cavity to fill before the melted polymer freezes off. In such cases, it’s particularly helpful to have as efficient an exchange of heat between the mold cavity wall and the cooling medium as possible, because a large ΔT is not available to drive the movement of heat from the cavity wall. The high thermal conductivity envelope, which surrounds the cavities of a Tachythermtm mold, facilitates the movement of heat out of the cavities, practically as fast as is thermodynamically possible.

·       Molding in electroformed cavities
Since Tachythermtm molds have electroformed cavities, they are ideally suited for applications in which electroformed cavities are traditionally used. Though this is not practical for applications where shim electroforms are used (e.g. optical discs), it is true for leather and wood-textured molds, optical component molds, automotive lighting molds, road marker molds, etc. If your mold is already electroformed, why wouldn’t you take advantage of the unparalleled thermodynamic efficiencies of a Tachythermtm mold?

·       Molding of complex shapes in three dimensions

Because complex three dimensional shapes defy uniform cooling with gun-drilled cooling channels, these molds invariably have hot spots, which limit how fast the molding cycle can be run. The conformal cooling channels and high thermal conductivity envelope of Tachythermtm molds are designed to eliminate such hot spots and to virtually suck heat from the cavity walls, efficiently and evenly.