OPPO Guangdong Mobile Communications Co., Ltd., with the brand name OPPO, is a mainland Chinese electronic equipment and smart terminal manufacturing company. It is headquartered in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province. At the beginning of its establishment, it mainly produced MP3, MP4, DVD, and other audio-visual playback equipment, and then entered the mobile phone market. Launched a camera smartphone with fast charging and image processing as its main selling points. Now ranks among the top four first-tier mobile phone manufacturers in Mainland China.

When it came time to replace their aging IMD/IML film hot forming press, they looked to Shuntec for a professionally customized forming solution for their complex-shaped, high-demanding mobile backplane parts.

After consultations with the Shuntec engineering team, along with OPPO’s future appearance designs and forming processes, Shuntec proposed a high-performance pressurized air hot bulge forming press to meet their specific needs. Size, pressure, daylight, servo-hydraulic control system, air pressure control, vacuuming device, and non-contact heating device were factored into the custom build.

Throughout this process the press acts as a clamp, applying force to the tool in order to counter the pressure being injected into the chamber, ensuring the tool remains closed. The upper introduced pressurized-air acts as a universal female die, forming the material to the shape and contour of the tool, so that the film material is perfectly and accurately formed and molded into the complex shape. There is no upper mold, only a lower mold. So, no film surface scratches are caused by direct contact with the mold on the film surface. The residual stress of the formed film is at a very low level. The corners of the composite material do not turn white after forming, while the printed layers are continuously layered, and do not separate. The unmanned operated non-contact heating device can also reduce the rejects by manual operation greatly. 

“We run the pressurized air hot bulge forming press machines to its limit by double-shift work per day. The machines go smoothy since they put into production,” said Joe Wei, Production Manager at OPPO. “We estimate we are doubling our production yield compared with before.”

With a 10-inch intuitive HMI system and Siemens PLC controls, it’s very convenient and easy to complete the operation of manual mode to accommodate die set-up and semi-automatic mode for continuous production. Once part recipes are perfected, they can be stored for easy recall.  “The new forming press makes forming those IMD/IML parts much easier. With Shuntec, the overall time required for the completion of production setup has been cut in half!” 

“Shuntec team really knows what we think, and what we want most,” Joe adds. “They could just make your idea come true in a cost-effective solution. Well done. We will place our new machine orders soon.”

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