Energy Savings & reduced Carbon Footprint with the Rotary Wheel Extrusion Blow Moulding Machine from Graham Engineering

Moulding Machine, with studies that confirm energy savings and significantly reduced carbon footprint, as compared to conventional Blow Moulding Machinery.

The machines motion has been designed with increased efficiency in mind – the Rotary Wheel system with a single parison provides a continuous upward extrusion captured by bottle moulds whose open and close motion is activated via a cam. This differs from typical blow moulding machinery motions, which shuttle the moulds back and forth, accelerating and decelerating with commensurate energy consumption.

The GEC Mini Wheel requires only two small electric motors to drive the Rotary Wheel, and uses only 2.7kW of Energy at Full Speed. The ‘Almost Electric-Hybrid’ uses only 5% of the total energy to drive a small electric hydraulic pump, required for the micro calibration parison control system for repeatable container wall section adjustment. 

GEC have also focussed on reducing the weight of the bottles, which in turn reduces the amount of resin used and cycle times required. The Rotary Wheel machine is able to provide ‘concentric consistency’, which means less material is used while maintaining part weight within the minimum percentile specification. Also as a result of the captured parison, containers can be efficiently produced in a neck-to-neck configuration, which results in fewer defective bottles and less scrap.

The weight was reduced from 9.8 to 8.5gm (13% saving) which equates to the HDPE requirements being reduced by approx. 900,000 kg. per year and a corresponding saving of 820,000 kg. of CO² over 500 million containers per year produced by the customer.

As measured by ‘Power Quality Analysers’, when producing a 250ml Single Serve Juice Container in HDPE on a Mega-22 Wheel with 88 cavities, the energy can be reduced from 6.5 to 3.8 kWh per 1,000 containers (representing a 42% saving)