Milacron Holdings Corp. is experiencing rapid adoption of the Mold-Masters Summit-Series premium hot runner across multiple market segments. Originally designed to be a medical molding powerhouse, the Summit-Series is proving very versatile with customers utilizing the stainless steel hot runner to mold premium packaging, personal care goods, teletronic parts and even small automotive parts.
Recent non-medical, innovative applications have included a support ring for a beverage application that used biodegradable resins. The characteristics of biodegradable resins demand uniform temperature distribution and Summit-Series nozzles excel in this area. In consumer goods, a multi-material razor handle required system corrosion and chemical resistance that the Summit-Series provides to produce flawless parts. Hans Hagelstein, Mold-Masters President, Europe, Middle East, Africa and India, provided the following figures, “To date, nearly half of the applications using Summit-Series around the globe are non-medical, highly demanding and innovative part designs. Sales of the Summit-Series have been strong since the launch with systems in production in North America, Europe and Asia.”
The Summit-Series launched at NPE 2015 as the new premium hot runner line in the Mold-Masters brand portfolio. The stainless steel hot runner system runs with 4 times less thermal variation from setpoint, compared to the typical thermal variation seen in a nozzle with a heater band. With less than 5 per cent temperature variation, this nozzle series is ideal for molding shear and temperature sensitive resins like PC, POM and PBT. The nozzle profile is especially effective for medical market molding where precision is tantamount and is now proving quite adept at a wide variety of other premium molding applications. The Summit-Series is clean room-ready and is the perfect hot runner solution for any molder looking to reduce risk and optimize molding process parameters with minimized variance and strong, repeatable results.
The Summit-Series also offers new valve gating methods using individual servo controlled actuators that makes the Summit-Series the top-of-the-line performance hot runner on the market.
“At Milacron we’re ecstatic that our customers are expanding Summit-Series uses beyond just the medical molding market. Customers are coming to us with applications that require excellent thermal stability, careful system balance and the need for pristine gate quality. They’re seeing fantastic results with Summit-Series,” said An Heid, Mold-Masters President, Americas and Asia.
Bruce Catoen, Milacron Chief Technology Officer added, “Our customers call on Milacron time and time again to engineer and manufacture solutions to all their molding applications. Summit-Series is designed to address the applications that push the limits of today’s hot runner capability. Milacron continues to be committed to working side by side with our customer to find answers to their challenges and Summit-Series is another in a long line of innovations that Mold-Masters has brought to market.”
Photo: Milacron
