Gefran at K 2025 with green, smart and connected solutions

Innovation, automation and digitalisation characterise Gefran's participation at K 2025, where the company will present various technologies designed to accompany the evolution of the industrial automation sector, particularly that aimed at plastics and rubber machinery.

"The plastics industry is facing a period of great change, between market uncertainties and new opportunities offered by data and digital technologies," stated Marcello Perini, managing director of Gefran. "Our objective is to support machine manufacturers in seizing these opportunities, improving the efficiency, flexibility and performance of their production lines. At K we demonstrate how our products and solutions, integrating Industrial IoT and AI, can translate into tangible advantages for companies, helping to strengthen their competitiveness and generate additional value."

The Brescia-based company proposes technologies capable of increasing the performance of extrusion, injection and blow moulding machines, with results immediately evident throughout the entire production cycle. Among these, an advanced application for full electric injection presses stands out, which uses the braking resistors of inverters to recharge internal batteries and redistribute energy during the machine cycle, reducing absorption peaks, stabilising consumption and optimising the management of electrical components.

The ability to offer complete automation solutions enables Gefran to support OEMs and system integrators with concrete and measurable technologies, capable of enabling digital transformation and accompanying the transition towards more sustainable production processes.

At the centre of Gefran's offering is G-Mation, an EtherCAT-based platform that simplifies automation architectures, reducing development times and integration costs. The heart of the solution is the G-Mation P6 controller, designed to combine high performance and flexibility, with cycle times up to 250 microseconds, native protocols (MQTT, OPC UA, Euromap), secure connections via integrated VPN agents and Docker architecture for installing applications as "apps", making automation modular and scalable.

For machine manufacturers, this translates into faster development of custom solutions, with predefined templates that accelerate design and configuration and the possibility of expanding functions without redesigning the entire system. G-Mation enables configuration of extrusion, thermoforming or injection moulding lines, optimisation of thermal and mechanical cycle supervision, integration of digital services such as predictive maintenance and consumption analysis and reduction of time-to-market thanks to an open and ready-to-use infrastructure.

The collaboration with 40Factory, an Italian company owned by Gefran and specialised in Industrial IoT services and platforms, has given birth to two specific solutions for the plastics sector. The first is MAX (Machine Analytics eXpert), which transforms machine data into immediately usable insights, improving energy efficiency, reducing downtime and enabling predictive maintenance. The second is GAIA (Gefran AI Assistant), a virtual assistant based on generative AI that supports operators and maintenance personnel in daily management, providing contextual answers on machine status, consumption, performance and technical documentation. At the fair, real applications on extrusion and injection moulding machines will be presented, already adopted by leading OEMs.

To guarantee high performance, a plastics processing machine must precisely monitor every process variable. Gefran proposes at K a range of sensors designed to combine accuracy, reliability and sustainability. Thanks to intelligent measurements of position, pressure, temperature, deformation and force, even in high-stress environments, it is possible to reduce machine downtime through predictive maintenance, optimise the use of raw materials and contain consumption, with a direct impact on production costs.

In plastics processing processes, energy and heat control is also a key element. For this reason, the company proposes the new GRC power controllers, compact and versatile, which integrate advanced functions such as Smart Load Management for power peak management, predictive diagnostics based on Digital Twin and remote supervision via web server. In addition, the solid-state relays of the GRx family guarantee precision and continuity even in rapid and repetitive cycles, with compactness and ease of integration for new generation machines.