Super Air Knives Cool Latex Molding Application
The customer produces molded latex mattresses for the bed industry. Part of the process involves heating the foam resin once placed into the mold cavity to cure it. The mold is heated to 70°C during this process. Once the mattress has been stripped out of the mold, the mold must be cooled back down to 30°C for handling reasons. Currently, the customer separates the mold halves and puts them into a cooling chamber for 20 minutes to get the temperature to the desired level. The customer has problems with separating the mold halves due to worker injury. They also would like to cool the mold halves down more quickly than the 20 minutes they have been living with. So, customer implemented (4) Model 110012 12" (305mm) Aluminum Super Air Knives into the cooling chamber. In this way, they can simply space the top half of the mold up with some wood blocks to allow airflow to access the inside of the mold. The Super Air Knives will now blow into the inside of the mold cavity to produce a convective flow of air to circulate the cold air into the areas that really need it most. The cooling time was reduced to 10 minutes which is in line with what the customer's original goal was for cutting cooling time and making for safer handling in the process.