COMPONENTS FOR HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES

FROM THE CONCEPT TO THE MASS PRODUCTION

Thanks to a sixty-year experience in the production of plastic and electromechanical components, dedicated to the market of household appliances, in particular to the treatment of fluids and water, the Group has an excellent capacity and competences to fulfill specific and customized orders within their internal process including: the project management in the phase of concept development and co-design, the product prototyping and industrialization and the manufacturing equipment, such as molds, robotized and automatic lines. Moreover, it is also able to support the process of approval and marks on customer’s premises, monitoring and follow-up of the mass production in our or the client’s establishments. An in-depth knowledge about all the phases allows the Group to monitor and optimize the entirety of phases of the development process so to obtain the results in line with the initial requirements in terms of product efficiency, quality, reliability and competitiveness.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

The capacity to transform an idea into a product

The research center of TP REFLEX GROUP is our heartbeat. Mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, materials engineers and experts in the process technologies cooperate and work in teams to transform an idea into a real design/product/production process. Our research areas span from the product functionality to the research on new materials and raw materials, from the research on new technologies to the process engineering and computerization.

PRODUCT DESIGN

Our designers have an important advantage: constant support and assistance in all the phases of the product development, operated by experts in applied technologies, such as mold designers and experts in materials.

Such a global approach allows us to be a reliable partner in co-design activities for any customer of the household appliances market. During that process the customers can present us their requirements in terms of product performance and design, which enables us to cooperate in the best possible way and introduce the entirety of optimizations for a reliable and quality production.

That activity is supported by 3D CAD software, our in-house simulation and application software that offers broad range possibilities of data exchange for a cooperative work with the ordering parties.

MOLD DESIGN

In our vision, the mold design is optimized in terms of not only construction and cost reduction, but above all further requirements of a molded component or product, from the start of manufacturing to the mass production. This is possible thanks to the support of product and process engineers in our research and development center who provide a crucial input to optimizing the mold project. The mold design is supported by in-house software, dedicated to the solid modeling (3D CAD) and the simulation of the molding process (moldflow analysis).

PROCESS DESIGN

TP REFLEX GROUP believes in a holistic approach, thus during the product development the designer is supported by a team that also deals with the conception and design of the production process,
which is almost always automated to guarantee maximum quality and efficiency levels.

The activity entails choosing the most appropriate technologies based on product type and production volumes and conducting an analysis of production flow right from the early stages of development.
Defining the critical issues of the process and the application of the PFMEA methodology allow for an immediate introduction of measures to optimize the control equipment and methods to reach high quality standards. Moreover, a long-term partnership developed with the suppliers of equipment such as extruding machines, injection molding machines, seals laying machines, robots and automatic assembly machines, winding, welding and control equipment facilitate the choice, already in the project phase, of the state-of-the-art solutions in different sectors.

PROTOTYPING

We can reduce and optimize the time to market of our components through both the rapid prototyping and the creation of pilot molds, shifting promptly form the CAD modeling to the prototyping of the working component, used for the activities relating to functional tests conducted in our laboratories and the customers’ test centers.

FUNCTIONAL TESTS

Our central laboratories have the expertise and technical equipment necessary to perform the widest range of tests supporting the entirety of development activities. The tests span from mechanical to hydraulic analyses. Further tests are carried out on all our electric and electronic products. We can conduct the entirety of functions and reliability test of the finished product, assessing its behavior and performance over time, regarding real operational lifetime.