With a half century of experience, the Austrian company Zitta knew it was time to reinvent PVC profiles to keep on winning in a highly competitive market. How?
‘’We wanted to combine injection-moulded parts with the extrusion process, improving the airtight joint between the profiles,’’ says Werner Baumgartner, Sales Manager at Zitta.
With its I-Kal system, Zitta can produce very thick or very thin profiles with high precision inside the outer profile, including functional pieces such as LED light strips. It can use materials that are soft or hard, transparent or coloured, and without glass fibre reinforcement, Baumgartner says.
‘’The main difficulty was to bond two different materials intimately without deformation by thermal effect or mechanical pressure,’’ Baumgartner says. ‘’The types of materials must have the same polarity in order to form a connection without any additional means, like a primer or adhesive.’’
The new process feeds the moulded parts through an extrusion die so that the film connects the parts. By doing that, Zitta can produce calibrated profiles as precise as +/- 0,1 mm in just about any geometric form.
‘’That opens up whole new areas of applications we hadn’t thought of,’’ says Baumgartner. ‘’We can now produce profiles with exact dimensions inside, independently of the wall thickness around them. And the outer shell can be water-tight and air-tight.’’
And how long does it take for such a made-to-order process? ‘’We can make custom formulas for windows or furniture within three days, and die-making in 10,’’ he says.