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Engel HL-Award in Gold for Georg Fischer Wavin - piping systems

This year's "Engel HL-Award" in the categories Gold, Silver and Bronze has been won by companies in Switzerland, Austria and Germany respectively: Georg Fischer Wavin AG, Subingen/Switzerland, Schneegans Silikon GmbH, Losenstein/Austria, and Beckenbach GmbH, Schönau, Germany. These awards for particularly intelligent and economical applications of the tiebarless injection moulding machine were presented at "K" in Düsseldorf on 21st October.

The first prize went to the firm of Georg Fischer Wavin for its production cell for the manufacture of large resistance welding fittings for pipes, an application which on account of its complexity is economically feasible only with the aid of tiebarless technology. To this end, the main bodies of the fittings are first injection moulded in an upstream injection moulding machine and then transferred, together with their cores, by an industrial robot to an external winding station where they are provided with their heating coils. These semi-finished parts are then transferred on a traversing carrige to the next injection moulding machine, an ES 600 HL (the largest tiebarless machine with a clamping force of 6,000 kN). The traversing carriage holds the parts exactly in position in readiness for the overmoulding of the coils and the final moulding of the pipe fittings. The large tiebarless space of the clamping unit has here been optimally utilized for the integration of complex automation peripherals and sophisticated sliding split mould technology into an injection moulding machine with the lowest possible - and hence most economical - clamping force.

Organized at regular intervals, the next "Engel HL-Award" ceremony will take place at Fakuma 2005 in Friedrichshafen. Engel is the world's largest single-brand manufacturer of injection moulding machines and at the same time one of the world's leading manufacturers of plastics processing