Company Announcement - The Institute of Plastics Processing in Industry and the Skilled Crafts at RWTH Aachen University is extending an invitation to the second International Injection Moulding Conference – in short IIMC – due to be held in Aachen on September 30 and October 1, 2015. National and international experts from the injection moulding segment will talk about application-related developments, research results and innovative examples of industrial series production.

The main topics at the conference will be innovative developments to improve the efficiency of injection moulding processes. In times of constantly rising costs combined with mounting demands on the quality of plastics products and the economic efficiency of the processes, this topic is of major importance in virtually all industrial segments, ranging from automotive and electronics to packaging and medical technology. The conference will show how much potential is still offered by further advances and new developments in machine and process technology as well as modern methods of process and moulding simulation for resource-oriented process efficiency.

Energy efficiency and productivity in injection moulding are largely dependent on the design of a machine technology that is geared to the relevant product. Speakers from international companies will deal in a series of papers and presentations with the further development of established drive technologies and their intelligent combination with process data documentation and control. They will take a critical look at the advantages and disadvantages.

Through the increasing integration of different functionalities in plastic products, the level of complexity is also rising. Standard injection moulding processes can only fulfil these requirements to a limited extent. For this reason, an increasing number of special processes and process combinations are being developed to enable economical and high-quality production. The speakers at IIMC will take full account of this development in papers that deal with promising special processes such as the thermoplastic foam injection moulding and integrated metal/plastic injection moulding techniques.

Increasing demands on efficiency are also being made on the design of complex plastic products. The invited speakers will show how modern simulation methods help to reduce iterations and prototype trials and increase the performance of new products. As a strategic industry event, the second IIMC aims to look at the above-mentioned technological complexes not only in isolation. The advancing use of Cyber-Physical Production Systems against the background of the "Industry 4.0" initiative makes it possible, more intensively than in the past, to intelligently combine simulation with the complexes of machine and process technology to produce effective manufacturing systems. As a result, inconclusive efficiency assessments of separate complexes are being replaced by an evaluation of the overriding life cycle efficiency, from the very beginning of the product development to the final recycling of the product. IIMC 2015 will thus cover, for the first time in the plastics industry, the use of CPPS on a scientific basis in the field of injection moulding.

In addition to the strategically selected topics and papers, the IIMC will also offer a global, inter-industry networking platform for all companies active in the injection moulding segment. The speakers from seven countries will come from the following companies: Haitian, China, Arburg, KraussMaffei, M.Tec, simcon kunstofftechnische Software, all Germany, SimpaTec, France, HRSflow, Italy, Sumitomo, Japan, Sabic, Saudi Arabia, Johnson Controls, RJG, both USA. Professor Christian Hopmann and his scientific staff from IKV will represent the scientific side with papers on innovative research topics.