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and offer more efficient mold changes." SIA has yet to figure out how much it has cut its energy bill by switching to all-electrics, but Castor is confident that "the savings will be there." SIA molds bumpers 24:7. It currently has seven active molds, all built in Japan, and makes on average four to five mold changes per machine per shift. The move to all-electrics required the automaker to work with its moldmakers to ensure that the molds are up to the task. Explains Bernardi, "The moldmaker needs to be aware of the capabilities of the machine and make design enhancements accordingly. Speed is a major issue: We could be talking about moving the core in a half-second. The tooling has to be up to the capabilities of the machine." At press time, SIA was preparing to fire up its second UF3850, which it will use primarily to make bumpers for its 2018 Legacy sedan. The Ube controllers are set up so that data from one press can be transferred seamlessly to another. SIA's relatively recent adoption of all-electric technology in the U.S. came after it conducted internal comparisons of metrics such as cycle time, mold development times, maintenance costs, operational cleanliness, and mold-change times. "Ube did a lot of presentations and we became convinced about the efficiencies of servos and that servo-driven machines represented the future in injection molding," notes Castor. Still, SIA is not ready to mothball its hydraulic 3150 and 3300 tonners. "We decide whether to run a bumper on a hydraulic or an all-electric based on a combination of production requirements, machine performance capabilities, and mold-change times," Castor explains. "Some molds run nearly an entire shift in the same machine without being changed because of current produc- tion demand. Also, due to auto-connector/auto-coupler styles, some older molds connect easier to the older machines and likewise the newer molds connect easier with the electric machines. We are in the process of standardizing these differ- ences so it won't matter as much." Castor continues, "We also tend to run the molds that have lower production requirements (require more mold changes) in the electric machines because of the speed they offer during mold-change and startup processes." Though it runs non-hygroscopic TPO, the SIA molding operation also includes a new central drying system from Conair, Cranberry Township, Pa. (conairgroup.com). "We dry the material to remove QUESTIONS ABOUT AUTOMOTIVE? Visit the Automotive Zone. "We're seeing less scrap generation with the newer machines. They are cleaner, require less maintenance, and offer more efficient mold changes." Subaru has documented an 18-sec improvement in cycle times since switching to all-electric presses. While TPOs technically do not require drying, Subaru recently added a Conair central drying system to ensure material is fed to presses at a consistent temperature with no surface moisture. 22 JUNE 2017 Plastics Technology PTonline.com A U T O M O T I V E Close -Up On Technolog y