4 compelling reasons to incorporate plastic components
CONTENTS
1. Tailor-made solutions for your company’s specific needs
2. Value for money and efficient production
3. Design and development of improved products
4. Competitive advantages in the market
5. Knauf Industries helps you design custom molded plastic components
1. Tailor-made solutions for your company’s specific needs
The first notable reason for incorporating molded plastic components into its manufacture is the customization these materials offer.
Every company has its own specific needs, and molded plastic enables these particular requirements to be met with optimum reproducibility. When an idea is original, stands out from the crowd and the prototype works, settling for standardized solutions can cause your product to get lost in the shuffle, despite its uniqueness. This happens all too often when a project is designed around components already available on the market.
By opting for customized plastic solutions, it’s possible to implement new developments, optimized functionalities or simply offer an improved, more attractive design. And all this without forgetting the cost-effectiveness that plastic components can offer. In short, molded plastics enable us to remain competitive in terms of customization, innovation and cost control – the three key challenges facing modern companies.
The first thing to do is to decide which type of plastic to use. There is a wide range of plastic polymers, each of which behaves differently according to temperature variations, cooling point, elasticity and malleability.
In this context, Knauf Industries can provide you with expertise in the use of a wide range of raw materials. In particular, we offer our customers the use of mono-materials, such as expanded polypropylene (EPP), expanded polystyrene (EPS) and its alternative from renewable resources NEOPS® (100% biomass), which make end-of-life recycling more efficient.
Once the material has been chosen, all that remains is to design the 3D plastic prototypes of each part. Once these have been assembled, tested and any defects corrected, all that remains is to move on to full-scale production. At Knauf Industries, this co-development process is extremely dynamic, to minimize the time between prototyping and mass production.
Working with custom-molded plastic components lets you adjust the size, weight, strength, insulating capacity, color and shape of each part.
2. Value for money and efficient production
In the industry, time is money. And so is the ability to ensure smooth, affordable production. Let’s not forget that the aim is to accept customer orders and develop them as much as possible, without driving up costs. Which brings us to the second major advantage of using molded plastic components: cost-effectiveness.
Plastic resins offer a versatility impossible to find in any other raw material. As an added bonus, honeycomb molding means that production can be launched relatively quickly after prototypes have been approved.
Thanks to Knauf Industries’ expertise in this field, you can benefit from molded plastic components produced to a specific density, even to strict tolerances, to meet future usage challenges. This mass production system enables finer finishes than other popular systems, such as blow molding.
Honeycomb molding of plastic components is an automated process controlled by computerized systems. As a result, we can guarantee that even minor production faults are detected and removed immediately, to prevent complex defective products from reaching the market.
This optimizes production cycles, while preserving the quality of the final product.
3. Design and development of improved products
One of the maxims of the industry is “keep it simple “. The simpler a mechanism, the fewer parts it has, and the more it meets our project requirements, the less risk of mechanical failure.
Honeycomb molding enables the production of single, lightweight parts, capable of replacing more complex, multi-component systems. In other words: with a single custom-made part, we can eliminate the need for screws, glue, gaskets and numerous fitted parts. As a result, there’ s less risk of mechanical failure and fewer supply problems. By extension, production times are shortened. What’s more, the use of a single material means greater control over final cost.
As you can see, the use of plastic components greatly simplifies part development and manufacturing reproducibility.
4. Competitive advantages in the market
The current economic situation has meant that stock-outs of certain raw materials are playing an involuntary role in the market. Not to mention soaring prices. These two factors can jeopardize an entire company due to a lack of components or a shortfall in the initial budget. Faced with this situation, the circularity of EPP and EPS makes them materials with an excellent future.
Producing plastic parts from these two cellular foams is not only simple. These components are also extremely light compared with other materials. Replacing heavier components with these lighter parts makes them easier to handle, install and remove, and reduces transport costs.
The carbon footprint associated with their entire life cycle is also reduced.
By multiplying their competitive advantages, customized plastic components are becoming the preferred choice for manufacturers who want to remain competitive while guaranteeing optimum manufacturing quality for their parts.
Knauf Industries helps you design custom molded plastic components
Knauf Industries offers the manufacture of custom molded plastic components, including support for development and prototyping. Our engineering department can help you design and produce customized plastic parts to meet your company’s specific needs.
Accompanying professionals from all horizons, we offer a complete service from co-development of your component to its industrialization. And if so many companies place their trust in us, it’s because the characteristics of our components enable them to remain competitive.
Knauf Industries designs and manufactures plastic parts with many advantages:
- Lightweight (98% air) ;
- Mechanical strength with high shock- and vibration-absorbing capacity;
- Thermal insulation ;
- Recyclable at end of life through existing sorting facilities and via Knauf Circular® ;
- Reduced carbon footprint.
In the food, household appliances, furniture and automotive sectors, EPS and EPP components are proving their worth. Would you like to make the most of them, by benefiting from a tailor-made design that responds specifically to your technical and business challenges?
So don’t wait any longer and contact our teams for a chat.
Between extreme customization, cost control, high competitiveness and adaptability to all your needs, molded plastic components offer undeniable advantages.
Would you like to find out more about the concrete applications of plastics? Take a look at some of the solutions we’ve implemented for our customers.
