Some 40 Sacmi-made high pressure casting cells have been installed all over the world since 2007. Featuring FPV-FPL pre-drying technology, they are used to manufacture over 100 different articles. Moreover, the new on-line supervisor - which, in keeping with Industry 4.0 developments, lets manufacturers perform constant monitoring and interpretation of all key casting parameters - is at an advanced implementation stage. Such results stem from years of intense R&D into optimal manufacturing solutions for sanitaryware items with ever-more complex shapes and geometries.
Now, the international Ceramic World Review magazine has published a 'Focus on Sanitaryware' piece that takes an in-depth look at the Sacmi approach to sanitaryware. It examines the most delicate stages of sanitaryware manufacture, those of drying and material shrinkage, which can have a huge impact on finished product quality and, more generally, process efficiency. Over the years, Sacmi has developed an integrated system that applies various aspects of ceramic technology on high pressure casting cells: this ensures structural verification of ceramic bodies, optimal control of modelling and mould and, lastly, feedback-based product control.
Summing up, in addition to allowing accurate body control throughout the drying-shrinkage stage, the Sacmi platform uses CAD design systems and advanced tension and deformation algorithms to simulate, at the early design stage, the characteristics of the final product. Porous resin mould and demoulding support maintenance/cleaning know-how lengthens the mould life cycle and minimises on-product stress and deformation. Then, there is the integrated ISOBODY system: this determines the thickness of the product exiting the casting cycle, allowing for feedback checks and optimising casting times to respond to even the tiniest changes in the rheological properties of the injected slip.
Another crucial aspect of the Sacmi approach - a key factor in the market's growing demand for this technology - concerns innovation in pre-drying, a stage critical to both process (space and energy requirements) and product quality. The main advantage of FPV-FPL systems - which Sacmi concentrated on following in-depth testing and research into several technological options - is that the desired product moisture loss is achieved in about 60 minutes via tangential ventilation (a result that requires 8-12 hours when pieces are left to stand at ambient temperature). This innovative process reduces energy consumption and limits cell size while simultaneously boosting the degree of Sacmi cell automation to 100%, making everything from de-moulding to finishing and on-car loading automatic. Above all, with this technology, sanitaryware pre-drying can be tailor-made according to piece geometry. That means nothing less than efficient management of every single article type on the market.
Click here to download Focus On SACMI Sanitaryware published in the latest issue of CWR (Ceramic World Review).