Protection of Mould Tooling with Cortec® VpCl® 649BD
“All moulders know that an effective mould cooling system is key to high quality mouldings produced with consistently low cycle times. At Labone we are making technically demanding mouldings in competitive markets so performance is important. When using water cooling / heating, Inhibitors are essential to reduce the build-up of deposits from lime-scale and corrosion to preserve mould and heater life and reduce the time spent on cleaning both. However, traditional glycols mixes are toxic and present a risk to personnel and a disposal issue. Also due to their high levels of concentrations (30-40% recommended) there is a significant cost associated with these materials.
Lake suggested changing to VpCl®-649 BD. It addresses all the environmental issues with no loss of performance and as it is designed to be used much lower concentration levels it’s saved Labone money. I wish we’d used it years ago.”
Richard Goldthorpe Technical Director
R.A. Labone & Co. Ltd
The Challenge
Labone specialise in metal pressing, injection moulding, insert moulding and assembly to ISO approved processes.
They had a corrosion problem when their tooling was offline or in storage. This would cause downtime in maintenance to remove the corrosion to make sure the tooling was fit for purpose. The problem was due to the cooling water in the system having no corrosion inhibitors when in service.
The Solution
VpCI®-649 BD at 0.5% was added to the tanks which contained the cooling water for the tooling, this was a closed loop system that ran through a chiller to control the temperature. The solution is now periodically monitored with a refractometer to make sure the concentration of the VpCI®-649 BD in the cooling water does not reach above 3%, this is controlled by adding VpCI®-649 BD or water to adjust the strength of the solution.
Customer Success
Labone have no corrosion issues with offline or in storage tooling since the introduction of VpCI®-649 BD to the cooling system. This has now saved on downtime with no maintenance needed due to corrosion.
Labone have been using VpCI®-649 BD for around 18 months and the monitoring procedure and operating guidelines were adopted six months ago.