Hekuma’s new needle hubs for insulin pens claim improved production speed and precision. Disposable needle hubs for insulin pens are equipped with a thread and a short cylindrical sleeve for the injection needle. Designed to be single-shot, they are screwed together for injection then removed and discarded. Self-injecting diabetics usually need several hubs per day; with around six million diabetics in Germany alone, annual consumption is in the billions. As all-plastic products, material costs are low and the more that can be produced within a given timeframe, the more cost-effective production becomes – so long as quality is consistently high and reliable.
Hekuma, the Bavarian systems manufacturer, mould manufacturer Braunform and Engel, the Austrian injection moulding machine manufacturer, have jointly developed a system that is claimed to accelerate needle hub production by up to 20%, to improve quality and increase machine availability. Hekuma’s contribution to the system is process automation; removing the needle hubs from the mould, along with the control and delivery of the products. It provides the take-out robot, with a side-entry linear robot (Heku DS) and gripper, as well as the quality control camera, transfer and bag storage. The take-out robot is equipped with an EOAT that handles 96 parts, instead of 16, and accelerates at up to 16g.
In the first step, the integrated vacuum system sucks the parts from the mould into the gripper’s fixtures. Light beams monitor when the respective spaces are clear, which activates gripper withdrawal and subsequent mould closure.
An integrated camera monitors product quality; pins that have been damaged during manufacture are automatically rejected. The system’s cavity-specific handling enables it to produce different parts within the same cycle provided they have similar properties, such as the same shot weight. The system presented at the K trade fair simultaneously produced needle hubs with holes of 0.5 and 0.3mm.
www.hekuma.com
Parts are fed to the machine by tube. (photo: Hekuma)
