Appliance maker urges plastics industry to move faster on 3D

Photo by Ar?elik A.?. The Ar?elik A.?. plant in Gaesti, Romania. The home appliance giant has 1,200 molding machines in house and buys 40 percent of its plastics from suppliers.

One of Europe’s largest makers of home appliances, Ar?elik A.?., is urging the plastics industry to step up the pace in adopting 3D printing technologies, as a way to “open doors” in developing new products and overcome limits with existing plastic technologies.

Speaking at a 2 December conference ahead of the PlastEurasia trade fair in Istanbul, a senior executive in the company’s manufacturing technology unit said it expects the technology to improve and be widely-used in a decade.

Istanbul-based Ar?elik, which is Europe’s second-largest maker of home appliances, is a large plastics moulder in its own right, with 1,200 moulding machines, 25,000 employees and 14 factories around the world.

But the company also buys about 40% of its plastic parts from other companies, and Metin Bilgili, the technical leader of Ar?elik’s manufacturing technologies directorate, told the conference that Ar?elik sees potential for major advantages in its production processes with additive manufacturing.

“If we can’t manufacture something with existing technology, 3D printing will up doors for us,” he told an audience of more than 200 at the Turkish Plastics Industry Congress. “The plastic industry needs 3D printing technology.”

Part of problem with existing plastics technologies is technical, he said: for example, there are limits in mould design that prevent the company from developing products as it would like.

“With the existing technology there is a barrier in front of the design of the plastic parts,” he said in a separate interview, noting requirements for inserts in moulds that limit Arcelik’s product design.

As well, Bilgili said the company would like to take steps out of the production process by eliminating or cutting back on mold manufacturing.

“You have to make the mould and you have to try the mould and you have to measure the parts, and then you have to bring the mold from the outside and put it in the factory,” he said. “With this 3D machine it is much easier. You have this one machine and you can solve everything with that.”

He said the Ar?elik buys 1,500 moulds a year.

He told the conference that while 3D printing remains too slow today for much of a role in commercial production, he expects that to change quickly, within 10 years.

“I have a really big hope about that,” he said, noting that he’s visited universities and companies developing additive manufacturing technology. ”They are working on it, but still [the machines] are a little slow. They have to make it faster.”

Bilgili said he’s familiar with the plastics industry’s existing efforts in additive manufacturing, including the Freeformer developed by German injection press maker Arburg + Co. KG. But he said it’s also not fast enough for Ar?elik’s commercial use now.

“I have been to the Arburg factory and I have seen the working conditions with it,” he said. “But the working conditions are still very slow.”

He also suggested that additive manufacturing could help the company better handle the increasingly fast product development cycles in consumer goods industries.

Ar?elik is expanding globally. In January, it announced a $100 million investment in a factory in Thailand, its 15th manufacturing facility.

The company, with 2014 sales of TRY 12.5bn (€4.1bn) has eight factories in Turkey, along with production plants in China, Romania, Russia and South Africa. It said it expects the Thai facility to be operating by the end of the year.

Turkey’s PlastEurasia Fair runs from 3-6 December in Istanbul.