Industrial Automation Magazine India

An injection-moulded polymer plain bearing in just seven days

Published on : Monday 06-03-2023

igus presents FastLine service with an online configurator for developers in the automotive supply industry.

March 2023 – Stressed automotive designers and buyers can breathe a sigh of relief. If they needed an injection mould for a special component suitable for series production and resistant to wear at short notice, they previously had to wait up to six weeks. Time that igus has now reduced to just seven days – with a service called FastLine. With the iglidur designer, customers can quickly order the tribo-optimised plain bearing. In just four steps, the required part is configured online and ordered from igus.

Many designers and buyers in the automotive supply industry know the problem: they need a special component beyond the catalogue products as fast as possible - such as a plain bearing for height adjustment in a car seat. Fire up the 3D printer? The bearing would be printed quickly, but not close enough to the later series solution – partly because of different tolerances and material properties. It would therefore not be representative for the validation beyond the prototype phase. The same applies to production with CNC lathes and milling machines, which leads to a different surface finish compared to injection moulding. And how about manufacturing the special bearing in injection moulding? It often takes up to six weeks or more to produce the right tool. Inconvenient when time is of the essence.

To solve this dilemma and enable short-term validation of assemblies with initial samples close to a batch product, igus has developed, among other things, a service called FastLine for the automotive industry. It enables easy configuration and ordering of tribo-optimised components in four steps using the online tool iglidur plain bearing designer. First of all, users select the desired shape – for example, a sleeve bearing. Then they choose the material for injection moulding from the iglidur range. Characteristics of the materials, such as maximum ambient temperature and surface pressure, are displayed clearly in the margin of the configurator. After entering the dimensions of the bearing - inner diameter, outer diameter and bearing width – the user immediately sees the total price for the injection-moulding production and can order. STEP files and PDF drawings of the bearing are also available for free download for further planning and designing. And this is how it goes on: after the order is placed, the online tool automatically creates 3D models and other design files, which a special team from the in-house igus tool shop called iform uses to programme CNC machine tools in a semi-automated manner. This means that the machines can start producing the injection-moulding tool faster than ever with minimal manual effort. A process standardisation with short throughput times, which won igus the Excellence in Production competition of the machine tool laboratory WZL of the RWTH Aachen University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology (IPT) in the category Internal toolmaking from 50 employees.