Feature Articles - Charles Industries

Charles Industries Collaborates with CAE Services to Create New Product Family Consisting of New Injection Molded Parts

Charles Industries, Ltd. is a privately held, diversified manufacturing and high-technology company with headquarters in Rolling Meadows, IL and five US manufacturing centers. Charles sells quality products, services, and innovative solutions to telecommunication, utility, marine, and industrial markets worldwide.

Over the years, Charles has successfully balanced growth through innovative engineering and manufacturing, as well as strategic acquisition. Its Telecommunications Group supplies a comprehensive line of outside plant (OSP) environmental protection solutions for copper, fiber, coax, and wireless applications. The Pedlock®, the industry’s first non-metallic buried cable terminal housing has proved to be the pedestal of choice amongst both incumbent and independent telephone companies for its high-quality, durability, and low installation and maintenance costs.

Albert McGovern is Charles Industries’ Director of Engineering for the OSP business unit. He is responsible for the mechanical engineering and design of all telecommunications products. He works closely with Batavia, IL-based CAE Services Corporation, a plastics engineering consulting firm.

McGovern says, “While we do not perform computer simulations of the injection molding process in-house, we rely on CAE Services to conduct them using Moldflow Plastics Insight (MPI) software to predict how a part will fill during the molding process. It’s tremendously helpful to have the good, known starting point such a simulation provides before we proceed to build and operate a mold.”

Recent OSP pedestal enclosure project

McGovern’s team was challenged to design a new base for a new product family of OSP pedestals comprised of multiple sizes. While previous pedestal bases were generated by extrusion, the new pedestals are to be injection molded. The new parts are two-piece, rectangular and the older versions were monolithic, circular types.

"I’m a believer in Moldflow technology because I don’t want to build a mold twice,” says McGovern. “If changes are necessitated after steel is cut, unwanted costs (and risks) quickly escalate. We believe that we are much better off to perform upfront, predictive molding analysis before steel is cut.”

CAE Services performed filling, packing, cooling, and warpage analyses on the two smaller pedestal designs: these molds were anticipated to be the most complex and largest of the product sizes. “Those analyses were important for us to obtain an understanding of what we could expect when the part was ejected from the mold,” says McGovern. The molds for these two smaller pedestals were family molds with two cavities – one for the rear half of the base and the other for the front half. Thus, when the mold opens both front and rear half base parts of the same size pedestal are ejected.

The parts are molded in a rugged PVC material that is well suited to the rigors of the telephone OSP environment. “PVC is sensitive to excess heat during injection,” notes McGovern. “As it is pushed into the mold, if the chamber is too hot or the gates too narrow and the runners too small, the PVC will shear and burn. So, instead of the standard telco green color that we anticipated, we would have a green part with black streaks through it.”

The analyses were used to determine not only how the parts would fill and warp, but also to evaluate three sprue, runner, and gate designs that would not burn the PVC material, prior to beginning the mold design. These included a single sprue cold runner, a multi-runner hot drop, and a multiple sprue cold runner design (a.k.a three-plate mold). The single sprue cold runner system had a very short runner design that would produce very little material scrap with each shot. This approach was initially suggested by the mold builder but McGovern and his team didn’t know if it would work to fill the parts because of their large size.

The second proposed design used multiple, hot runner drops, but it was too costly to merit further consideration. The third approach was also more costly than the first, and used multiple cold runner systems for a three-plate mold with big sprue gates. Although this was clearly more complicated and involved more scrap material with each shot, it was analyzed to ensure a design could be developed in case the first approach didn’t work.

McGovern and his team preferred the first proposed design. “We asked CAE Services early on to work through the different gating scenarios to prove to us the one we preferred would work. They were able to do that and hence, started saving us money on this project right off the bat. To use a three-plate mold as proposed in the third mold design would have added at least another $20,000 to the mold costs. Hot runner systems would have been equally expensive. Needless to say, we were delighted to know that the simpler, less expensive approach would work. We wouldn’t have known that with the confidence we needed to have without the MPI analyses,” says McGovern.

In addition, Charles Industries used the MPI analyses done by CAE Services to determine clamp tonnage for proper press selection. “This was critical because, even though we do have our own injection molding machines, we were not sure if they could handle this job,” adds McGovern.

Indeed, the analysis results deemed that the pressure at injection would exceed the clamp tonnage on the existing machines. This information will be used in the justification to acquire properly sized injection equipment. “This was very important information to us,” McGovern says. “If we ordered a press, at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars plus installation costs, and found out that it couldn’t mold the parts, we’d be in deep trouble and out a lot of money. So the MPI results assured us of the right machine for the task.”

Once the analysis was completed, everyone was in agreement that the mold design and press size would produce good parts, including the Charles’ injection molding plant manager, Charles’ Design Engineering, the mold builder, and materials supplier. All of these entities were involved in meetings during the analyses, coordinated by CAE Services, to ensure the analyses were on course and had the latest information, and that communication channels were maintained to minimize “surprises.”

McGovern says he works with CAE Services because they are one of the most highly recommended Moldflow consulting firms in the Chicago area. He says he values and respects CAE because of their expertise and experience and their strong value system that guarantees their efforts will not cease until they have met their obligations – and their customers’. “People here, from the plant floor to the COO and CFO, are impressed that analysis can help us predict whether parts are manufacturable and can optimize mold designs. Without the software and CAE’s expertise, we’d be relying solely on our cumulative past experiences, even if they aren’t sufficient,” McGovern says.

CAE Services contribution

Mark Solberg is CAE Services’ vice-president of sales and marketing. For the Charles Industries project, CAE engineers used Moldflow Plastics Insight suite of solutions including filling, packing, cooling, and warpage. In addition, the organization uses MPI cooling injection, injection compression, and 3D modules. The company has used MPI for more than 6,500 projects for the automotive, medical, electronics, and appliance markets. Today, 50 percent of its business is automotive-related. The company has a technical center with six molding machines ranging from 18 to 400 tons.

Solberg says, “In today’s competitive marketplace, companies need to consider the benefits that outfits like Charles Industries realize as a result of using upfront plastic engineering analysis. Companies fail to realize that machine downtime, material costs, engineering time, and tooling modification quickly add up to thousands and thousands of dollars. It’s not unusual for companies to spend $20,000 to $30,000 in trial and error to obtain a good part. However, an early design cycle analysis that costs a couple thousand dollars that can save tens of thousands of dollars in the long run makes perfect sense.

“Charles Industries is aware that they need to do the analyses because they know it’s a cost effective tool. Many companies continue to go through multiple trial and error scenarios and hence, can’t get their products to market on time. They have lots of new designs and they aren’t sure if they are moldable. They will build a $300,000 mold without doing the engineering upfront – wasting tons of money.”

As a Certified Moldflow consulting firm, CAE Services assures its customers that its professionally trained engineers are proficient using the powerful Moldflow products. “We have more than 23 years of experience using these tools,” Solberg adds. “That’s important. We add a confidence factor when we start a project. Customers know that working with us, they are going down the right path and will not have to budget money for trial and error six months from now. The theory behind performing analysis is to identify potential problems before they occur. Although there are dollars involved in upfront expenses, those dollars will save the end user between three and four times the amount of the analysis.”