Polymer Training and Innovation Centre
12 July 2018
Polymer Training and Innovation Centre is an internationally recognised centre of excellence in the field of polymer training, education and expertise.
Polymer Training and Innovation Centre, a technical training and consultancy business, owned by the City of Wolverhampton College, Polymer Training specialising in injection moulding, blow moulding and extrusion training.
Polymer Training emphasised their requirement to create a showpiece, state of the art training facility replicating the industry standard. They wanted to give students a more in-depth training experience, while focusing on maximum efficiency and more economical equipment. Polymer Training were after solutions to reduce clutter around the site, reduce their manual labour and improve efficiency throughout.
With the support of a project manager, sales engineer and two technical design engineers, plans were created to implement a fully centralised loading and drying station, thus increasing flexibility of material around the plant to up to four different machines, significantly improving plant efficiency.
Summit Systems, as per the brief, managed to install a fully centralised loading and drying material system consisting of 6 material bins and a 6x4 manifold table produced by Summit Systems fabrications department. Alongside this, Summit Systems installed a range of VISMEC equipment including a pump filter, 2 dryers, a control server and a state of the art supervisory system. Intelligent pipework was installed by Summit pipework engineers, using glass components to create a super hard wearing solution.
On completion, the newly installed system gave flexibility for material to be distributed to more than one machine throughout the plant.
Technical Trainer Neville Dudley comments "Our new material central feed system has enabled us to create a true lean/5s environment on PTIC's journey towards becoming Europe's number one supplier of training to the Polymer Industry. Our continuing partnership with Summit Systems is proving invaluable in achieving this goal. The Summit Systems central feed system is cutting edge equipment, and fully represents the commitment of PTIC in maintaining a state-of-the-art training facility.”
Project manager Richard Dean says “We made a conscious effort to ensure Polymer Training’s system was designed and installed to give the trainee the best like for like training platform. This central system replicates an Industrial system, fully labelled to assist the operator in material/ IMM connection selection coupled with a material management area.”
The VISMEC supervisory system also allows us to control and operate machinery from tablets, mobile phones and computers outside of the Polymer Training site.
All material storage bins were labelled and incorporate an A4 sized pocket to allow the operator to place a laminated ‘Material Safety Data Sheet’ against each machine.
Polymer Training Neville Dudley concludes “The project delivery, installation and commissioning was managed by Summit with a high level of professionalism and care, and has proven to be of great interest to our students and more in line with equipment used in our industry…. not to mention a show piece".