ABSTRACT
The competitive pressure in the refrigerator industry is constantly increasing. Therefore, many manufacturers are forced to reduce their costs while simultaneously enhancing production flexibility. Hennecke is once again responding to the demands of the market by providing the LinFlex™ system, an entirely new production line concept for insulating refrigerator cabinets with rigid polyurethane foam.
This paper will illustrate the new technologies developed for the LinFlex system that are superior to the conventional stationary refrigerator cabinet systems. These new LinFlex technologies have been proven in many plant installations to save up to 30% manufacturing space and subsequently reducing capital cost for the equipment. In order to achieve this success, innovative designs were implemented to allow rapid and easy change of fixtures/cores from one refrigerator model to another with virtually no effect on production (zero-time change over). Just as important, the cycle time could be as low as 30 seconds depending upon production requirements.
As noted, this LinFlex system can produce many different models, but one more critical aspect needed to be solved. This was to supply variable curing times to support different models which was solved with innovative designs to have variable curing times as low as 3.75 minutes up to 15 minutes.
Additionally, since the LinFlex system is a turnkey process, other enhanced technologies will be presented. These processes include a patented design to blend a variety of blowing agents and reduce the number of pour stations from eight (8) or sixteen (16) to one (1) or two (2) respectively.
