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Ilkay Özkisaoglu
Since 04/2021 147 Episoden

#147 sensXPERT receives AVK Award on contactless cure testing in trenchless technologies

05.11.2024 6 min Staffel 5 Episode 105

Zusammenfassung & Show Notes

sensXPERT - Optimizing Plastics Manufacturing receives AVK Award on contactless cure testing in trenchless technologies

During the award ceremony Jens Ridzewski, Prof. Dr.-Ing. held the laudatio and reasoned the award as follows:

"If you also look at the production of liners or the application of liners, it used to be common practice to cure the liners, i.e. for the trenchless rehabilitation of pipes, using steam.

For some time now, UV curing has become established here. In itself a very, very nice topic, but you have to bear in mind that UV curing is of course controlled by how quickly you pull the lamps through the sewer, through the pipe and how thick the material is.

This all has an influence on the degree of cure of the material, and sensXPERT - Optimizing Plastics Manufacturing (NETZSCH Group) has managed to install an in-line system here, which is therefore directly able to determine the cross-linking, the degree of curing, of these liners, and that is important to monitor the quality in-line and then, if necessary, to adjust the process parameters, for example to reduce the speed of passage.

The first two points are the result of this project. The advantage of UV curing over steam curing... the trenchless sewer rehabilitation compared to excavation, especially in urban areas, does not need to be clarified.

The point is precisely what the jury assessed here is the continuous process monitoring and the in-line control of the parameters for the cross-linking of the curing of the liner, so that in principle the risk of having to remove semi-cross-linked liners from the old pipe can be significantly minimized."

Ilkay Özkisaoglu took the opportunity at the JEC Forum DACH 2024 to speak to Dominik Riescher, who represented sensXPERT - Optimizing Plastics Manufacturing after this year's AVK award ceremony.

AVK is the world's oldest plastics association with an impressive history of over 100 years now. For the past three decades they award innovation in the DACH region and foster a culture of collaboration between academia, institutions and manufacturers. Composites Lounge congratulates all members and the AVK leadership Elmar Witten and Michael Effing for leading the community and having a fine taste when it comes to groundbreaking technologies in plastics and composites!

JEC Group fantastic Forum in Stuttgart! Looking forward to JEC FORUM DACH in Italy, Central Europe and again in Germany (Dresden) in 2025!

YouTube Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB42gygZPWw&feature=youtu.be

Transkript

If you also look at the production of liners or the application of liners, it used to be common practice to cure the liners, i.e. for the trenchless rehabilitation of pipes, using steam. For some time now, UV curing has become established here. In itself a very, very nice topic, but you have to bear in mind that UV curing is of course controlled by how quickly you pull the lamps through the sewer, through the pipe and how thick the material is. This all has an influence on the degree of cure of the material, and NETZSCH has managed to install an in-line system here, which is therefore directly able to determine the cross-linking, the degree of curing, of these liners, and that is important to monitor the quality in-line and then, if necessary, to adjust the process parameters, for example to reduce the speed of passage. The first two points are the result of this project. I don't think I need to go into them any further. The advantage of UV curing over steam curing, I would say, is obvious, and the trenchless sewer rehabilitation compared to excavation, especially in urban areas, does not need to be clarified. The point is precisely what the jury assessed here is the continuous process monitoring and the in-line control of the parameters for the cross-linking of the curing of the liner, so that in principle the risk of having to remove semi-cross-linked liners from the old pipe can be significantly minimized. Again, I would like to invite the NETZSCH representatives to the stage. -Good, well explained, thank you very much, very well explained, thank you very much, thank you! So wonderful good afternoon, dear LinkedIn community and Composites Lounge members, JEC Forum DACH, buyers and sellers. Yeah, we are here now together with Dominik Riescher of sensXPERT. Dominik, I know him from our LinkedIn activities around about their AI solutions that are optimizing processes in mold. We will talk about that in a moment. But first of all, Dominik, my congratulations. You have won an award here from the AVK, which is now also 100 years old. -Thank you, Ilkay. Can you tell us about yourself a bit so that our community knows whom they are listening to today? -Yeah, for sure. Like I said, my name is Dominik Riescher. From my background, I am a sensing expert. I worked like six years in automation for the industry, including injection molding machines. And for half a year now I'm with sensXPERT. And today we are here, because we won the AVK innovation prize for one of our key technology solutions in real time process control. One of our key innovations optimizes the curing process during trenchless pipe rehabilitation. Particularly when they have UV-cured liners. Here our technology ensures high quality, while reducing costs and errors for the rehabilitation projects. -So that's the speciality of the innovation that has been awarded. -Kind of, yes Where is this technology exactly applied? You mentioned sewer pipe repair. Yes. This technology especially is used in trenchless pipe rehabilitation, especially where they used UV-cured liners for damaged pipes. So these are the reverse liners put in order to rehabilitate old pipes that are leaky. And you make sure that your system ensures the curing of that process, right? -Exactly, with the curing. We are measuring the curing of these liners. And with this data we correlate them to quality assurance metrics like the information of degree of curing, elasticity and styrene content. And this information is transferred to a third man, which then is controlling the speed of the UV core, ensuring that the quality of the curing is exactly the same at every time. And to ensure that we don't have any jumps in the curing. In the past, these pipes had to be cut. A ring had to be cut and tested. So I am assuming that this is now contactless. You don't need to to check it by destroying the material, right? Exactly. Our sensors are mounted at the UV core, which is then pulled through the liner to harden it. And we are measuring the curing of the liner. However, the same core technology is also being used in plastic manufacturing through our Digital Mold solution, where we measure the material behavior of plastic during the process like injection molding, compression molding, vacuum infusion, or autoclave curing. We can use it for thermoset, thermoplastic, and elastomer applications. We are measuring the material behavior directly in the process, and can then adapt the whole process dynamically to what the material really is doing inside the machine. So, Dominik, what advantages does the technology offer? The sensXPERT Digital Mold solution technology offers real time monitoring and control during the molding process, optimizing efficiency, reducing scrap and cutting cycle times, and just offering a whole better understanding of the complete process. And with this information of material behavior, it offers you a complete new world of optimization possibilities. In total, it reduces the cycle time by up to 30%. It reduces the scrap by up to 50%. It reduces the energy consumption and just makes sure that each part is cured to the perfect value. How does this solution contribute to a more sustainable world? There are two ways we are contributing to a more sustainable world. And the one place, if we look at thermosets and elastomers, where we can cut the cycle times, where we can reduce the scrap, which leads to less environmental impact of each part produced and less energy consumption. And at the second point, when we look at thermoplastic, where using recycled material becomes more and more important. We can measure the deviations in the recycled material and adapting the process dynamically, making it more easy to use more recylate and still have a perfect product in the end. -What do you expect to gain from your visit to the JEC Forum DACH 2024? The JEC Forum DACH 2024 is great to connect with the plastic manufacturing key players. And of course, ultimately we want to show how real time process control can make traditional manufacturing more advanced, more efficient and more data driven. And that's also a great point, because our product is able to be retrofit in any machine. So making it more intelligent and more efficient and data driven. Dear community, This is day one of JEC Forum DACH 2024. We've spoken this morning with Kerry Lyons from Base Material (UK) and now with Dominik Riescher of sensXPERT. And you see, we are all about innovation, technology and sustainability and we will keep on techtaining you here from Stuttgart.