The technical partnership between Uniloy Milacron and B&R Automazione Industriale is ten years old. The union of these two companies (Uniloy and Milacron, each contributing its original technology, know-how and experience) created the need to unify the machinery management procedures and to rationalise the development process, by adopting a shared control Platform.
It was decided to use B&R's automation solutions to meet these needs, and with the very first medical machine fully controlled by B&R devices, Uniloy Milacron opted to exploit the Automation Studio native integration for all the automation components: CPU, I/O, motion, user interface etc.
Over the following years, new technologies and new products developed by B&R have been integrated into the existing systems, adding more features and increasing the reliability and safety of blowmoulding machines, without however neglecting the investments made in the previous projects.
The latest shared project is a new injection-blowmoulding machine for the production of top level pharmaceutical and cosmetics packaging. Featuring the most recent safety systems, this machine can process all the polymers currently available on the market. Furthermore, the machine, equipped with complete and integrated B&R equipment, shares the control and automation software developed for other machines, and also the same basic structure and user interface. All this has allowed sizeable savings in development and maintenance times and costs.