News from Liquid Control Limited

Resin mixing is the key to performance filters success  04 Nov 2011

Pipercross designs and manufactures air, oil and fuel filters for bus, truck and train as well as high performance competition cars and super bikes. They are at the forefront of air filter technology with over 28 years of developing for road and race applications.

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A fundamental requirement in filter manufacture is to bond and seal the top and bottom of the element

To continue to improve its product, Pipercross realised it needed to update and improve its resin mixing capability and investigated what options were available. The fundamental requirement is to bond and seal the top and bottom of the filter element, to achieve this Pipercross needs accurately to meter and mix a two-component Greenfield Polymer polyur-ethane and dispense into a rectangular or square mould. After its deliberations, the company approached Liquid Control to assist with the resin dispensing technology.

Accuracy of quantity dispensed is important to the quality of the filter; if there is too much resin, even by a small percentage, the effectiveness of the filter is reduced because the excess resin is extruded into the filtering area. If there is too little resin, the filter would leak and be rejected. Also crucial to the quality of the filter is the repeatable viscosity of the mixed resin, a function of accurate ratio metering and temperature both constantly monitored, the ratio by flow monitors enabling a closed loop self-correcting system. If the viscosity did vary then the ‘wicking’ capability would change, again reducing the performance of the filter. Liquid Control equipment enables improved air filter design due to Pipercross being able to accurately refine dispensed quantity and quality.

Accuracy of quantity of resin dispensed is important to the quality of the filter

The process of manufacture is to place the base filter mould on the Liquid Control XY Cartesian robot, manual initiation will start the Liquid Control DXE60 resin mixing machine and XY with the resin mixing head on the robot it will dispense automatically around the profile of the mould within a fraction of a millimetre ensuring accurate placement of resin for when the filter element is placed in the mould. The mould with filter element in place is now put on a temperature controlled carousel allowing the polyurethane to cure. When this process is complete the top filter mould is placed on the XY robot and the dispense process repeated, the half pre-assembled filter is now placed into the top mould and again allowed to cure, this then results in an assembly with a filter element moulded with a polyurethane moulding to top and base.

“Because of the programmable dispensing precision of the Liquid Control Posiflow DXE60, we are able to refine and improve the quality of our filters and save money because of the 50% reduced reject rate which was an unexpected bonus, if you also take into account the 40% increase in production due to increased speed and importantly improved reliability we are a very happy Liquid Control customer,” commented Adam Hughes, Design Engineer with Pipercross.

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Posted in News from Liquid Control Limited on 04 Nov 2011.