No Bottlenecks: Motion Control Keeps Plastic Container Production Moving

A few weeks ago, we wrote about servomotors and bus communication systems in beverage can manufacturing. This week, we focus on plastic bottles. The extremely high volume and commensurate speed requirements for these products make them great examples of the uses and applications of motion control, which is why we keep returning to this industry. Beyond just soda bottles, this technology applies to other consumer containers as well: shampoo bottles, for instance, or food products like ketchup and mustard. Besides the high speed and precision molding required for most of these containers, motion control’s main contribution to their production is speeding tool changes for different sized bottles, shortening a process that can take valuable minutes, down to mere seconds.

Plastic container production also led IIS to an area of manufacturing that we might not have thought of just a few years ago: equipment upgrades. We’ve always offered our repair expertise for many types of machinery, but we’ve recently noticed that the increasing scarcity of parts for obsolete equipment was making repairs prohibitive, both to factories and to us. Using our production and motion control expertise, we’ve begun offering a hydraulic conversion upgrade packaging, featuring a number of benefits:

• Up-to-date machinery: less repairs and more available parts.
•  Reduced cycle time: by half, in many cases. Faster speed and less energy lead to much greater efficiency, which takes us to . . .
• Tax credits: There are a number of state and federal programs that offer tax breaks for equipment upgrades and purchases that reduce overall environmental impact.

There aren’t many reasons not to upgrade, according to these! For further details on this still-new service, be sure to contact IIS with your equipment details today.