An insight into Kistler's production system

Kistler Group creates equipment for the inspection of parts that can be used in the makeup of medical devices. Medical Plastics News spoke with them at MD&M West to see what devices they had on show.

Kistler is well-known for its range of process monitoring and measurement solutions for medical device manufacturing that were showcased at MD&M West were no exception.

When looking at the machines, Curtis Krick, plastics & advanced manufacturing manager at Kistler Group, said: “What you want to do is see and understand how the faults occurred. So, you have a root cause you can then identify and say, I can re-simulate these. Once you reset, evaluate the faults, then you're able to put the criteria in to keep it from happening again. And you're able to control the process.

“You want to know these specific conditions that caused this problem. We have systems that would be considered AI because they do have intelligent learning capabilities and these models say, ‘this is what we predict the problem will be just based upon estimations of what the specific conditions might be’.”

Process monitoring systems play such an important role when creating medtech devices; they can prevent something going wrong, ensure there are no faults, make the manufacturing more efficient and avoid recalls. Kistler’s machines help manufacturers meet the requirements of the healthcare market, making production a lot more efficient.

The company showcased ComoNeo, which supports injection moulding. Kistler claims the system is more accurate than before and supports users throughout the entire validation process, due to its newly added features. The user management and trail functionality help maximise safety and security whilst its extended user interface boasts a reliable transmission of data to the injection moulding machine.

The test automation for continuous materials is critical for manufacturers and this is where the company feels KVC 621 has its benefits. This universal video measurement system focuses on high, individually adjustable speeds. Kistler insists this machine achieves reliability and operates with a processing speed of up to 6000 measurements per minute.

“You can know exactly where something was wrong or off, but you can then have all that information. We can backtrack to what was wrong with those parts. So, you can go back and look at all of that and see this part was fine and this one was bad.” Kyle Fischer, IPC field sales engineer at Kistler Group, explained. “And then you have the exact data, so you can see exactly where you heard it was bad, or if it took more force or anything to assemble a little, you can go back and say ‘all right, you guys did this wrong, fix this."

Kistler's aim is to ensure that the whole production cycle is covered. They seem to have machines that can test every element from design to manufacturing the finished product, making the manufacturer's job much simpler.

“You industrialise it through the process, validation, qualification, everything, and then you start production.” Stephan Vogel, head of international business development at Kistler Group, said.  “If we need to have vision inspection or if they want more properties or different properties, we offer all of that too.

“So, we have all the interfaces that are necessary today with all the industrial feed passes; you get it all out on one hand with one consistent data quality and data handling which is the biggest advantage that our customers have. In process monitoring, it’s not only the product testing, process monitoring but the whole value chain of the selection.”