NORTH AMERICAN LIGHTING
 Material Handling System 

North America Lighting needed a new material handling and drying system for a section of the plant that was using an older, desiccant drying/conveying system. This section has 21 machines, on which North America Lighting performs 50+ mold changes on a daily basis. The system needed to keep 50 different materials dry yet be able to provide any one of these material to any given machine. They also needed the ability to change material quickly since all of their machines use quick mold change systems. 

Thermal Tech Equipment and Novatec were privileged to be awarded the project and we delivered a system that any company would be proud of. 

On the material handling side we provided a traditional dedicated line system with a quick change manifold. This allows any material to be conveyed to any machine. Since the dried material was to be conveyed on a just-in-time basis to the machines, it was determined that conveying material with dry air (using an existing dryer) and purging the lines of material every cycle would be the most efficient way to keep it dry.

What makes this system truly unique (besides it appearance) was North American Lighting’s desire to do all the material drying with non-desiccant dryers.

North America Lighting injection molds mostly hygroscopic materials in their automotive head and tail light facilities. Their biggest cause of rejects is a problem that everyone in our industry fights, splay. Prior to installing this system they had great success with Novatec’s NovaDrier(TM) Patent No. 6,584,701. Whatever jobs they used these dryers on they saw their reject rates fall. This is why they chose to use Novatec for this project. 

When installing systems many budgetary decisions and justifications have to be made. Although Novatec’s NovaDrier(TM) is priced very competitively with traditional desiccant dryers on an individual basis, when it comes to larger systems it is more economical to provide a large desiccant dryer that provides air to many hoppers. North America Lighting’s engineering and molding departments were convinced that individual NovaDrier(TM) were the way to go on this project and were able to justify the additional cost to upper and international management. This has proven to be a good decision since the scrap reduction they were seeing on an individual basis is now occurring system wide.

View slideshow # 1 click    ►  

View slideshow # 2 click    ►  

To view the slides one at a time click   ►