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Special open house revels vision, knowledge and competence
View of the test lab.

Special open house revels vision, knowledge and competence

Plastics specialist IGUS hosted an enthusiastically attended open house event at its parent company in Cologne on June 7. Some 30 invited guests witnessed the mastery and, above all, the vision the company cherishes. And it is one that stands for adaptive and resistant growth in a constantly evolving industrial landscape.

"A full tour of our company here basically takes two full days," Thorsten Beitzel of Igus France explained after his brief company presentation. "Only today we only have about three hours." In any case, it turned out to be three very fascinating hours, during which we paid a diagonal visit to some key departments within the company, and concluded with the affordable, but no less high-tech robotics IGUS has in store. An overview.

Cable confection

The tour, led by Thorsten Beitzel, got off to a convincing start with a visit to IGUS' renowned cable-making department. Here every finished product - a cable fitted with custom connectors - for 100% is tested for functionality before delivery. In the lab, batches are randomly tested for durability via, among other things, long-term cyclic tests.

The impressive injection molding department
IGUS' impressive injection molding department.

Injection molding

Then comes the dominant injection molding department, where IGUS goes for full 100% recovery of the residue in the injection channels. A completely separate mini-department operates autonomously, supplying granulate, removing finished product and changing molds without any human intervention. 

In the Technicum department, our eye is also drawn to an injection molding machine that incorporates solid glass fiber into the product by cutting it to a relatively large caliber (6-8mm) just before injection and dosing it in situ, i.e., in the mold. The technique produces a composite material with special mechanical characteristics. During our visit, for example, pedestals for solar panels were injected with this material.

The in-house mold shop is possibly even more impressive, with an information panel along the aisle that should keep everyone on their toes: 'IGUS wins the trophy for in-house mold making in Germany anno 2022, knocking off 2 BMW plants.'

Igus Cologne
IGUS Cologne. Back of the new building with external support structure.

The roof and new construction

Before taking the external steel spiral staircase to the roof, a quick visit to the raw materials warehouse is made. "This is where raw material is permanently stored for a full year, a policy we already implemented pre-corona," Beitzel points out.

On to the roof, then: only here do you notice the size of the spherical skylights, all neatly facing north for labor-friendly light. No annoying full sun in the workshops, here. We now also see the adjacent new building popping up, with a yellow-painted, load-bearing structure that this time was done externally. This creates significantly more useful space. IGUS has yet to lay its eggs about a final layout for the new building, says Beitzel: "We certainly don't want to decide on this too quickly; being adaptive is at least as important to us. Hence the choice of a large, say oversized building."

The robotics showroom
The robotics showroom.

Showroom

The Stand department, as it is called in German at IGUS. It was indeed created in response to the pandemic, and provides a kind of permanent exhibition platform from which to reach the world online. There you can see just about every product IGUS has in its portfolio. A very complete, almost material catalog, which also gives price indications. Very dynamic and animated execution too, with working systems like plain bearings and openwork robotics in full action, freely operated by the visitor.

Department of robotics

Just when you think you've seen just about everything: enter the showroom for affordable robotic systems from IGUS. The compactness of the robot and cobot systems on display here is particularly striking. Jack-of-all-trades that, depending on the configuration chosen, can easily perform gluing work, quality control, pick and place, or any other tasks. Anyone who ever gets the chance to see this kind of robotics at work will realize that the words "limit" or "limit" will soon become completely irrelevant. However, everything hinges on that configuration, which can be built by the user himself, online. The website of IGUS' Affordable Robotics therefore provides an improbable multitude of options and add-on components such as vision systems and sensors, drives, steering systems, grippers, and so on, with which you can really go either way in the configurator. A video library of existing systems endorsed by customers and once ordered certainly helps you with this. By the way, the configurator itself has a powerful simulation tool, which allows you to even better assess whether your configuration will be able to handle the planned tasks. All controls are also supported by the intuitive IGUS software, which is included free of charge.  

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