Ultramelt Flowsim - Developing an approach to model and demonstrate benefits to injection moulding, including 30% cycle time reduction and 28% energy use reduction

Matrix Moulding Systems (MMS) has been formed as a commercialisation vehicle for novel enhanced polymer processing and recycling technologies, some of which have been developed over recent years by our parent company: The Technology Research Centre Ltd. MMS has access to electrical and mechanical engineering facilities, workshop and electronics lab facilities and access to a range of thermoplastic polymer processing and testing equipment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an increase in demand for injection moulded plastic (protolabs.co.uk). However, _despite this, most companies are anticipating a negative effect on turnover due to lockdown/social distancing requirements (BPF 2020). Our aim is to target improved growth and to allow injection moulding companies to recover from COVID-19 rapidly. Our technology, Ultramelt can improve productivity while reducing energy and carbon footprint costs to target a greener, faster period of UK GDP growth._

Ultramelt is a technology can improve the injection moulding process and contribute to helping the UK to 'build back stronger' in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Injection moulding produces polymer parts used in diverse applications from wheelie bins, telephone handsets and automotive parts to syringes, butter tubs and bottle caps. Therefore _our project can contribute to '__sustainably rebuilding'_ _the UK economy; injection moulding has seen increased demand for use in producing COVID-19 test kits (protolabs.co.uk), yet, despite this, most companies are anticipating a negative effect on turnover due to lockdown/social distancing requirements (BPF 2020). Ultramelt can increase productivity within the injection moulding sector while reducing costs associated with production and contributing to UK's carbon reduction targets._

Ultramelt can reduce the temperature required during injection moulding. For example with PP, melt temperatures can be reduced, from 230ºC to 190ºC, representing an 18% reduction in heating requirements. This therefore reduces the associated energy costs, saving around 137kWh per tonne moulded and reducing carbon emissions by 35kg for each tonne. If this was extended to just 7.5% of the market, we could see reductions of up to 131,490,000kWh and 33,661 tonnes of CO2e each year. Ultramelt also reduces the heating and cooling time required for each product, which means higher production within a single day, increasing productivity by up to 20%.

We aim to use the funding obtained to build a special instrumented unit to aid data capture to enable faster development of production systems to commercialise the Ultramelt technology quickly across the UK.