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Long established as a shop window for Italy’s plastics machinery industry, Plast 2018 drew a strong attendance with the injection moulding sector well represented among the innovations.

Italy’s Plast 2018 exhibition in Milan from May 29 to June 1 took place in a busy year for major international shows, coming soon after the annual Chinaplas fair and triennial NPE show in the US. However, Alessandro Grassi, President of the Italian plastics and rubber machinery association Amaplast and the company that organises Plast, Promaplast, said he was “quite satisfied” with the outcome. Grassi noted “the great satisfaction of the exhibitors, who enjoyed the significant attendance by qualified operators and an impressive number of contracts signed directly at the fair. The expectations — already quite ambitious — ended up being outstripped by reality.” Plast 2018 attracted a total of some 1,500 exhibitors over 55,000m2 of exhibition space. Promaplast estimated that more than 63,000 people visited the show, although it said an exact number cannot be determined because tickets gave admission to four other related shows running at the Rho exhibition ground at the same time. Foreign visitors made up 27.5% of the total number of visitors; it said non-Italian attendees came from 117 different countries, with Spain, France, and Germany the most strongly represented. [...] In another Italian move, the company announced at the show that it has chosen the PiovanGroup as an advanced partner for downstream technology. The two companies aim to develop and sell joint system solutions. Various pieces of Piovan equipment have been adapted to suit the Sumitomo (SHI) Demag machine series. The cooperation will initially cater to European markets and will then be gradually stepped up to accommodate other global regions.

Piovan pointed the spotlight at the new Aquatech Easycool+ range of chillers that comply with European Union Ecodesign regulations governing energy efficiency of such products that come into force in 2021. The company says that in most cases, chillers are not designed and calibrated specifically for plastics transformation processes, but have merely been adapted. “If they are effective in the process, their costs and energy consumption are high because they were not conceived for this kind of application, and energy outlays push up production costs,” it says. “If they are inefficient, their initial costs are lower, but they have to be run at full capacity: expensive maintenance and imprecise temperature control negatively impact finished product quality and costs. Easycool+ by Aquatech overcomes this problem: it is a chiller conceived, designed and built for cooling in industrial processing of plastics.” When processing plastics, the temperature ranges to be maintained for different processes can vary by as much as 50°C or more, demanding different pressures and flow rates from the chiller. “Easycool+ has the flexibility to maintain optimal working conditions at all times,” says Piovan. Easycool+ employs ‘plug and play’ technology with integral circuitry in the machine: eight different hydronic versions available for each model, with or without thermal storage, and specific versions for use at extremely high flow and pressure. A system built with Easycool+ is sized to ensure the lowest possible refrigerant load. Power ranges from 60 to 250 kW.

Read the complete article published on Injection World.