Rosti
Innovation & Sustainability Centre
The Innovation & Sustainability Centre has dramatically accelerated bringing a design to life; it can now be realised within 72 hours.
The Innovation & Sustainability Centre’s dedicated team of engineers combine technical and production expertise to support customers in agile development programmes that deliver ideas to market more rapidly and cost-effectively than traditional technologies. The knowledge gained over many years of plastic processing and product development enables a truly world-class offering that adds significant value to any development programme.
Sunny Sun
Strategic Integrated Solutions Director
Adding value during the concept-to-reality journey
The aim of the Innovation & Sustainability Centre is to add tangible value in a process that fulfils the “Concept to Reality” tagline faster than ever before. For the past 75 years, Rosti has been committed to bringing customers’ designs to life, but the Digital Innovation Lab has dramatically accelerated this process, which can now be realised within 72 hours.
Remaining agile in today’s fast-paced, ever-evolving development cycles, where flexibility is a critical success factor, is a “must-win battle”. Rosti is one of the few companies equipped to harness the latest advances in 3D printing to gain time-saving advantages over traditional prototype part testing. We aim to help customers push design boundaries by physically testing moulded components and assemblies in a fraction of the traditional lead times.
The 72-hour from-concept-to-reality process
Once Rosti’s engineers receive the customer’s 3D product data and specifications, the clock starts ticking. Design and product requirements are analysed and added value optimisations are recommended to maximise efficiency and minimise production costs. At this stage, design analysis is complete and component prototyping is initiated for physical testing.
Rosti’s moulding experience is a core competence. This background gives us the capability to leverage best practices from our extensive knowledge database of past projects and case studies in the development of digital simulations of the injection moulding process. Analysis of the digital simulations provides benefits not only in component design, but also enables optimisation studies of moulding scenarios. This provides accurate production insights into part quality and optimised product costs. The range of aspects examined includes gating, cooling, distortion and cycle times.
The output of the simulations is fed into the tooling process. After the design is finalised, the printed tool cavities and cores are started. The tools are grown from the ground up in high-temperature resins that can withstand conventional injection moulding processing environments. Following inspection and assembly, the tools are ready for moulding in the lab’s dedicated moulding machine.
The moulded parts are verified by optical laser scanning. Full metrology reports are available within minutes to verify production intent and support front-end predictive analysis of the resulting product measurements.
The Innovation & Sustainability Centre adds value for designers and end users
Utilising the Innovation & Sustainability Centre gives designers greater freedom. This agile development platform enables rapid design iterations that can be physically tested in the intended design materials. Several design iterations can be generated in the time it would take to produce a single design example in a traditional product development schedule.
Design envelopes can be pushed, as the time and capital investments are significantly less compared with previous analogue development cycles. Designers are empowered to fail forward, released from the restrictions of time and investment. Ideas can be trialled, refined and repeated to maximise product functionality – a process that ultimately maximises added value for the end user.
Imagine uploading your data to the Rosti servers, then arriving at the Innovation & Sustainability Centre three days later to see your designs come to life in your intended design material, ready for physical testing.
All within 72 hours!
