BBM Maschinenbau- und Vertriebs GmbH

Use-case Manufacturing & Industrial Processes

The tooling for blow molding machines involves the development and production of mold tools required to manufacture hollow plastic products such as bottles or containers. In the blow molding process, molten plastic is first extruded and then placed into a two-part mold before being inflated to fill the inner surfaces of the mold. After cooling and solidifying, the mold is opened, and the product is removed.

The quality of the final product heavily depends on the quality of the tooling used, making precision and quality in tooling crucial. The molds must meet specific requirements: they must have the right shape and size for the desired product, withstand the high pressures and temperatures of the blow molding process, and be designed for easy opening and closing to extract the finished product and repeat the process. These factors make blow molding tooling a challenging and precise discipline.

Situation

The design of the blow head in blow molding machines requires iterative design, based on designer experience and real machine testing, often involving manual post-processing.

Problem area

Challenges include the high time consumption for manual post-processing, material waste, and heavy reliance on the individual expertise of the designers.

Goal

The goal is to leverage simulations to gain insights into the blow head design process, reducing the need for experiments, time, and costs.

Relevant KPI’s

– Reduction in lead time for blow head design
– Decrease in the number of design iterations
– Reduction in material waste
– Decrease in manual post-processing time
– Improvement in the quality and consistency of the extruded preform
– Increase in the prediction accuracy of simulations

What do we actually do?

Learn more about IANUS

We support customers from the industry with our DeepTech solutions in increasing the technical efficiency of processes and machinery while minimizing resource consumption. Our AI-based prediction and construction assistants enable a rapid assessment of various design drafts through rapid prototyping and identify potential optimizations. These are based on digital representations of the respective processes, which can be analyzed through fully automated simulations, allowing for the synthesis of extensive data pools that our AI assistance systems can work with.