When you close a valve on the supply or return side of your water manifold, how do you know which cooling circuit you are turning off? Are you able to perform quick mold changes? Are your hoses organized and attached correctly?
Injection molders face a variety of challenges for ensuring that molds are cooled and operating at peak efficiency, which is why we designed, engineered and manufacture the patented Plastixs LinkedXValve™ system.
How LinkedXValve Works
LinkedXValve is a valve linkage system that allows a single lever to operate a mold cooling circuit’s supply and return valves simultaneously, allowing for faster mold changes and decreased downtime. LinkedXValve helps to prevent mistakes, leaks, burns, contamination, and product defects by turning off cooling circuit valves in pairs. It also allows operators to easily see whether each valve pair is turned off or on.
The LinkedXValve manifold assembly has a small footprint, allowing it to be installed close to the mold for optimal efficiency. The valves feature a color-coded cover and are supplied with Supply and Return labels to help with hose organization and mold setup.
On large cooling manifold installations, LinkedXValve ensures that the back row of valves, that are often blocked and hidden by hoses, are shut off simultaneously with the correct valve for that circuit. This one-lever mechanism is convenient, beneficial and efficient, helping to prevent spills and lost production time. This is especially important in cleanrooms where, if the wrong hose is disconnected and causes a water leak, contamination occurs and often all production must be quarantined, cleaned or discarded.
LinkedXValve also prevents “no-flow” catastrophes, when the cooling circuit needs to be on, but one of the valves for that circuit is off, which can cause damage to the mold and will potentially cause parts to no longer be within specification.
Getting Started with LinkedXValve
If you want faster mold changes with fewer chances of error and downtime, LinkedXValve could be right for you – find out more by speaking with one of our injection molding and manifold experts. LinkedXValve is installed in our standard compact stainless steel manifold assemblies, and in SMARTFLOW® 1.0” and 1.5” aluminum manifold assemblies.