Working double time: How Irish moulder doubled cleanroom capacity

Trend Technologies Ireland, a contract moulder of devices for the medical and life sciences sectors, recently opened its third ISO Class 7 (10,000) cleanroom at its extensive 7,000 square meter manufacturing facility in Mullingar, Ireland.

Trend’s capital investment in the facility and additional cleanroom space and equipment, including a number of Sumitomo Demag 50-tonne IntElect machines, has enabled the company to boost process stability and achieve shorter production runs.

Trend’s site in Ireland is the company’s ‘Centre of Excellence’ for injection moulding, and provides tooling, project management, Moldflow and Scientific Injection Moulding support to Trend Technologies sites globally.

“The Irish and UK medical device sector is in a sustained growth phase,” noted Trend’s manufacturing manager, Tom Kelly. “We are in the process of building another cleanroom, which when complete in the summer will expand our cleanroom manufacturing capacity by an additional 400 square meters. This is in response to the positive outlook for the sector and the increasing demand for high quality medical device components.”

Items moulded on site by Trend form part of Class I, IIA, IIB and III medical devices and include wound care products, diagnostic laboratory consumables, ventilator housings, surgical handles and stent delivery sub-components. Most of these are highly customised, so when making the investment in new cleanroom machinery Trend focused on sourcing equipment that would automate process stability and increase product integrity.

Although this isn’t Trend’s first foray into all-electric machines - it installed its first over a decade ago - senior processing engineer Trevor Thornton reported that the Sumitomo Demag IntElect’s are proving to be particularly flexible and reliable. The manufacturing site also has 32 Demag hydraulic machines.

“We knew that all-electric machines are more energy efficient and better for repeatability,” says Trevor. “Yet, given that we can mould larger products that weigh from one kilo right down to 0.025 grams, geometrical tolerances can be extremely tight.”

To accomplish the combination of precision and repeatability, Trend makes full use of the activeLock technology installed on each IntElect. “We use it on every product moulded and activeLock saves us an awful lot of bother when dealing with such small shot weights. It means we don’t have to run any decompression, which can draw air into the melt. This ultimately reduces rejects.” Since installation, Trevor said activeLock has reduced defects in the process significantly.

The Trend team is equally complimentary about the IntElect’s machine sequencing and how straightforward it is to programme, even with little operator experience. Trevor explained: “Even seemingly simple components can be complex to mould. Having a HMI interface that integrates fully with the moulding system, water heaters and the robots, saves us a considerable amount of programming time. For non-standard items, we can programme in-house within a couple of hours versus several weeks. This enables us to be more responsive, achieve faster changeover times and meet evolving market demands.”

Putting into context how they see the cleanroom injection moulding contract market evolving, Tom comments: “With the continuing implementation of Lean Manufacturing and continuous improvement, there’s been a definite shift towards shorter runs. As a result we are accommodating more moulds and faster changeovers. This is only made possible by complete equipment standardisation and the connectivity of the machines and associated ancillary equipment. This is an evolving and improving process that can only be made possible by working with aligned suppliers.”

Trevor notes: “We implement Scientific Injection Moulding (SIM) principles on a daily basis and can say it’s in our DNA as part of how we set up our processes. The adoption of SIM has been made significantly easier with the repeatability and flexibility of the IntElect machines, both in our Mullingar facility and at our other global sites. This has enabled Trend to build and seamlessly transfer tools between sites, reducing part and process variation and project delivery lead time.“

Industry 4:0 is certainly firmly on Trend’s radar and the company has been approached by Sumitomo (SHI) Demag’s UK Managing Director, Nigel Flowers to participate in a predictive maintenance trial. “From a production perspective, we are fairly Industry 4:0 advanced and use real-time data to work smarter, reducing programming complexity and production lead times,” notes Tom.

Already, the technology is improving the company’s 24-hour breakdown response time by 80%, as well as increasing first time fix rates to over 90%.