If you are involved with film decoration technology you are surely familiar with the issues of single image decoration. Single image decoration is necessary if the decor can’t be applied in endless material feed, because the film includes elements like writings or chrome highlights.
To guarantee the correct position of these elements in back injection, significantly higher process costs and effort will be necessary. If additional decor elements like circumferential chrome edges should be positioned on a curved component shape, the manufacturing tolerances of the individual process steps in addition become too high.

Our research team set their focus on this task, and presented their first prototypes just recently. The IMD Multi-K technique avoids the positioning and thus the tolerance problem

by splitting the manufacturing process up. One segment that gets decorated with an endless film feed during the first injection process and another segment which gets decorated with a seperate film and merged to the first segment during a second injection process in the same mould. Staying with the example, the chrome edge isn’t attached to the same film as the others anymore, but gets applied to the component during a second injection process. It basically is a two component repositioning technique combined with a film decoration technique. All of this is happening in one mould on one machine.

This new technique avoids mismatching between film and component shape and solves the former problems of single image decoration. Another advantage of IMD Multi-K is the 2k injection technology itself. The combination of transparent and non-transparent compounds gives us the opportunity to illuminate the components partially. Conceivable would be a door entry strip whose chrome edge or writing gets illuminated at night. Here as well the customers demand for new possibilities in design and thus new techniques were taken into account. The designs we are able to produce now, through the combination of different endless film decor feeds, would have brought intense effort and cost with them, producing them with single image decoration.

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