R&D / Leverage, a specialist in tooling for injection stretch blow moulding of PET bottles, has replaced desiccant dryers on seven Nissei ASB and Aoki injection stretch blow moulding lines with LPD vacuum dryers from Maguire Products.
The company says the switch from desiccant dryers to vacuum dryers has benefitted the company by reducing energy use and decreasing startup and changeover times.
“While the desiccant dryers needed four to six hours to dry material, the LPD dryers take only one hour and twenty minutes from a cold startup and in subsequent drying cycles this is reduced to forty minutes,” Alan Tolley, Managing Director at R&D / Leverage.
“The LPD dryers give us much more flexibility when testing different grades of resin on one tool, because we are not a production-scale facility with long product runs, the desiccant dryers were always a challenge for us, posing problems with getting the material dried properly.”
Tim Lloyd
Five of Seven LPD Dryers at R&D Leverage
The LPD dryers also display improved resin filtration, which provides enhanced bottle clarity due to less contamination and more flexible throughput control for the single-cavity pilot tool versus high-cavitation production tools.
R&D / Leverage has also installed a central Maguire Weigh Scale Blender, delivering to the moulding process precisely controlled batches of virgin and recycled polymer, colorants and additives.
Tolley added: “In the past we were forever having to change desiccant every six months because we were doing so much stopping and starting of our moulding processes. That meant added cost and added maintenance.”
Paul Edmondson, Managing Director of Maguire Europe: “Considering that drying polymer can account for 15 per cent of the total process energy of a moulding operation, a compelling reason for using vacuum dryers is that they consume up to 80 per cent less energy than desiccant systems.”