Forming
Take-out insert helps boost container plant’s pack rate checking around the pickup area on bottles. DuPont Vespel SCP-5050 provides excellent wear and impact resistance. It tolerates heat well, doesn’t absorb oil like graphite and carbon, and offers low thermal and electrical conductivity. The material offers the best performance characteristics of plastics, ceramics and metals. The material was developed for aerospace and high-heat industrial applications. The benefit at the Australian plant has been an increased amount of product being packaged and shipped, with less product being rejected for bottle checking and other quality issues. “That’s a major focus in any glass plant - an increase in the pack rate versus what they melt,” Halliday says. Plants using carbon inserts typically must dedicate more manpower to continuously monitor production lines, ensuring those inserts hold up and there is no checking of bottles. “Using SCP-5050 allows workers to
focus on other areas to ensure production is running smoothly,” Halliday says. “With carbon inserts, they always tend to be managing loss or wear of the carbon, and instability of the bottles due to wear of the carbon. All of those issues can be alleviated from the use of SCP-5050.” The inserts are durable and longlasting enough that they can be pulled off a machine during a job change and be put back on later when the job resumes. This is particularly helpful for plants that do frequent job changes and end up throwing inserts out. In addition to take-out inserts, the material can be used for other parts and shapes in glass handling. This includes the contact surface of deadplates, where the material protects the bottom of new formed bottles. Vespel is often used as a ware guide and offers much longer life than traditional carbon guides. �
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n Australian glass bottle manufacturing facility has begun using a take-out insert material that has become an important part of more efficient production. The plant, operated by a global packaging company and located close to Adelaide, has found that the DuPont Vespel composite material SCP-5050 offers a substantial increase in the service life of the tong inserts compared to carbon inserts. “Based on the performance of SCP5050, similar bottle plants in the AsiaPacific region—and around the world— can see savings in total cost of ownership of approximately 40% compared with traditional carbon inserts,” says Brendt Halliday, a business manager for glass industry products for Pyrotek. Pyrotek is DuPont’s agent for Vespel SCP-5050 in the container glass sector. Because take-out inserts are the first objects to touch newly formed hot glass containers, which can easily be damaged, the right material can reduce issues with
� The DuPont Vespel SCP-5050 take-out inserts made by Pyrotek.
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