Profile Plastics
—Strong engineering adds
value to projects for medical
THERMOFORMING
By Mark Shortt
Thermoforming Giant
Opens up on
Work for Medical,
other Industries
L
66
isten to Steve Murrill give an overview of Profile Plastics,
the company that he serves as president, and you’re sure
to get much more. Murrill, a degreed chemical engineer
with an MBA in finance, has been actively involved in working
to advance not just his company, but the entire thermoforming
industry since he bought
Profile Plastics in 1986. In a
Strong engineering
December phone interview,
adds value to projects
Murrill traced his company’s
for medical and beyond progress from the mid-’80s
against a backdrop of technical milestones and trends—the evolution of pressure forming
and 5-axis CNC machining, for example, and the greater use of
molded-in features—all the while explaining what they’ve meant
to the success of thermoformers everywhere.
Profile Plastics (www.thermoform.com), a custom thermoforming company in Lake Bluff, Illinois, specializes in producing highly engineered plastic parts to close tolerances and high
cosmetic requirements. The company has reportedly won top
honors at 19 of the annual SPE Thermoforming Parts Competitions, sponsored by the Thermoforming Division of the Society
of Plastics Engineers, since SPE began sponsoring them in the
1980s. Murrill himself was honored as Thermoformer of the Year
by the Division in 2011 after winning a Lifetime Achievement
Award in 2001.
We asked Murrill if he had enough room at his facility to hold
all those awards. He wasn’t biting.
“We don’t rest on our laurels,” he replied, adding that although many of the winners were state of the art at the time that
they were awarded, time marches on and new challenges continue
to emerge with each passing year. “It’s fun to look back at the old
ones, and we have some, believe it or not, that are actually still
in production. The very first one, in fact, is still in production.”
Murrill was referring to an air conditioner plenum for a mainframe computer room, which requires very precise temperature
control. “The part we make has nothing to do with the air conditioning system, but they needed a 2-foot by 4-foot, complete air
distribution and air intake plenum to put as the room interface
between the air conditioning unit and the ceiling and the room,”
he explained. “So this unit is 2 feet by 4 feet, and it has the air
filters for the return air and the air distribution network, if you
will, to distribute the conditioned air very efficiently. We developed it in 1986 and it’s still being sold today.”
These thermoformed enclosures earned Profile Plastics one of
its many awards from the SPE Thermoforming Division Parts
Competition. Photo courtesy of Profile Plastics.
Profile’s 100,000-square-foot facility includes more than a
dozen dedicated thermoforming cells and a similar number
of 5- and 6-axis CNC trimming cells, providing the capacity
and flexibility to meet a variety of fast-changing production
and product design requirements. The company offers custom
vacuum forming, pressure forming, and twin sheet forming, and
can manufacture parts up to 8 feet by 12 feet from thermoplastic
sheet up to 0.5-inch thick.
The ISO 9001:2008 certified company also takes pride in
its success in expanding the viability of thermoforming, largely
through use of what it calls value added engineering. A good
example, Murrill said, is the increased use of molded-in features. “By being able to mold more features in, that often times
cuts costs,” he said. “Because one option is to not have many
features molded in, and either machine them in or bond them
on separately afterwards. That raises the cost and increases the
opportunity for rejects.
“A significant push is towards a lot of tooling creativity to mold
in features,” Murrill added. “The other part is in this attention
to detail on the backside, developing the 5-axis CNC machining
strategies to capture a part repeatedly in a nest or a fixture, and
programming the 5-axis machine to trim it consistently, and then
have ways to QC and monitor the process of the parts to be sure
that the consistency is maintained.”
Murrill also said that the breakthrough of 5-axis CNC machining helped thermoformers compete with injection molders by enabling them to produce parts with the consistent fit and function
February 2014 • www.d2pmagazine.com
67
required of precision injection
vantageous. Pressure formmolded parts. “To go after that
ing has higher cosmetics,
market, the part had to have a
which means more expenconsistent trim and a consistent
sive tooling. You can get
fit. And in the early days, it was
higher cosmetics having
all being hand trimmed, which
the sheet molded against
was not only very labor intenthe tool—the cosmetic side
sive; it was very imprecise,” he
against the tool. So it’s gensaid. “So the 5-axis CNC machinerally a tooling issue that
ing, which came largely from
separates the two.
the woodworking industry in
Twin sheet is an innovathe late 80s, was really kind of
tion that allows two-sided
the breakthrough to solidifying
forming that you can’t get
the quality of the fit.”
in pressure forming versus
Thermoformed parts proinjection molding, which
duced by Profile Plastics are
is two sided by definition.
used in a range of application
The folks in the automoareas requiring large, highly
tive industry started callcosmetic parts that are manuing it (twin sheet) sheet
factured to tight tolerances
blow molding, and that’s a
and in relatively low volumes.
pretty good definition of it
One of the company’s core
because it really now can do
markets is medical equipment,
products that blow molding
including covers and enclosures for Profile Plastics concurrently developed nine mating and
would do. But blow molding has two
imaging machines and carts. But the matching parts for the dental imaging unit. Engineers
significant advantages: At very high
company also does work for OEMs in optimized points of attachment so that the product could be
volume, it’s low cost, and if polyethylassembled easily. Photo courtesy of Profile Plastics.
the industrial, transportation, food
ene will work for an application, they
and beverage, and recreation sectors.
(blow molders) will be very cost effecOne project for a medical OEM challenged Profile Plastics to
tive. But if it’s not polyethylene, and the volume’s not that large,
provide multiple parts for what was intended to be an aesthetically
the blow molders aren’t really set up to handle those situations.
appealing dental imaging unit without any hint of trimmed edges
Twin sheet forming can operate underneath that gap or void
in its final assembly. Profile’s engineers designed the tooling for
in the market with lower run, shorter run requirements. Any
nine of the component parts, most of them using articulated
resin we can find in sheet form, we can twin sheet. We can have
undercuts to ensure that trimmed edges weren’t visible in the
the advantages of two different types of materials, two different
finished product. Pressure forming was used to ensure that final
thicknesses of materials, two different colors. It also creates a
parts showed consistency in color, texture, and gloss throughout
hollow space between two parts, which is useful many times for
the entire product. And with a view to final assembly, engineers
insulation—either sound insulation or temperature insulation.
optimized the points of attachment to ensure that it could be
By creating that space, you also create places you can run wires;
assembled easily.
you can use the part to be an air duct.
When all was said and done, Profile completed the complex
There are some headliners that have twin sheet ducting sysproject on time and on budget, enabling its customer to meet
tems in them that are very sophisticated. It’s like an airplane—
its production and marketing goals. But although it neatly rephow you have the air drop over every passenger’s seat. Well, you
resents Profile’s ability to meet the stringent requirements of
can do the same kind of thing in automotive or truck, having
medical equipment OEMs, its relevance extends beyond that.
a web, if you will, or a network of one big twin sheet part that
Over the years, customers have come to recognize that Profile
will duct the heat or cool to specific areas in the vehicle. That’s
Plastics, sharpened by its experiences in the medical arena, brings
generally not a cosmetic application. You just want to get wires
to each project the same manufacturing know-how, the same
or air—hot or cold—from one part of the product to another
commitment to engineering excellence, and the same thirst for
part of the product.
D2P: Medical is one of your core markets. Do you see any
creative problem solving that it turns loose when working for
major trends in the medical industry that are impacting the
medical equipment OEMs.
types of products being developed, or the way they’re being
“There’s not too big of a difference in terms of the way we
manufactured?
deal with the customers,” says Murrill.
SM: I see two. One is the one we all know of, but it can’t be
Following is an edited transcript of our conversation with
overlooked. We tell the story that we made the covers for GE
Steve Murrill.
Medical’s first ultrasound machine, and it was approximately 5
D2P: As a provider of heavy-gauge thermoforming, Profile
feet tall, 3 feet wide, and 3 feet deep. It was huge! And a couple
Plastics offers vacuum forming, pressure forming, and twin
of years ago, in GE’s corporate annual report, they had a picture
sheet forming. Could you talk a little bit about the factors you
consider when using each process?
of their ultrasound unit, and it was a notebook. It had the same
SM: Definitely. Vacuum forming, generally, is for non-cosmetic
sensors, the patient contact sensors for the key readings, but it
parts or very low volume parts where the least costly tooling is adwas all about a computer and now is the size of a notebook. So
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DESIGN-2-PART magazine • February 2014
A close up view
of dental imaging
equipment for
which Profile
Plastics provided
pressure formed
covers. Company
engineers designed
tooling for nine
of the component
parts, most of them
using articulated
undercuts to
ensure that
trimmed edges
were not visible on
the aesthetically
pleasing product.
Photo courtesy of
Profile Plastics.
that miniaturization of computers has had a
huge, huge impact on the medical industry
because things have gotten smaller, and as
they get smaller, injection molding is more
cost effective.
On the other side, the patient contact is
still the same. People are still the same height, weight, and have
the same needs for testing. For an X-ray, you’ve got to have a table
for them to lie down on, and with an MRI, the machine has to
be as big as a person. So even though the computer is smaller,
the patient interfaces are similar. So that has helped our industry
because we’re more cost effective versus, say, injection molding,
the physically larger the parts are.
D2P: If a design engineer for a medical device manufacturer
were to ask you what some of the latest capabilities in plastic
thermoforming are that could help them bring their product to
market, what would you tell them?
SM: The very first question is ‘What would you like it to do,
and what can it do now?’ There are some resin breakthroughs in
terms of high temperature or high performance, or high chemical resistance. The evolution of plastics, polymers, is continuing,
and now you can get more and more technology in the sheet
than you could, perhaps, 10 years ago, or, certainly, 20 years ago.
You can get more in the sheet. We’ll take the aircraft industry,
which is not medical, but the aircraft industry now has what is
politely called, ‘No nothing’ sheet—no smoke, no toxic emissions. It’s suitable for putting it in an airplane where people used
to die from asphyxiation due to the outgassing of the interior
components. So that technology is huge, and there are bound to
be areas in medical equipment, in particular, where that’s used.
Many of the medical applications [for thermoforming] are
carts, which deliver technology to the patient’s bedside. In that
sense, it’s operator conveniences that have been invented—you
know, creative ways to design things. It’s in the design, put it that
way, and not so much that the process brings that. The designer
brings that and the process is able to complement it.
D2P: Your website (www.thermoform.com) shows an example
that Profile worked on for the medical industry. It was pressure formed dental imaging equipment that was converted
from the initial design to be compatible with thermoforming.
What processes was that product originally designed for?
SM: In the early days, it was largely metal and metal castings.
Let me back up slightly and say the precursor was the film X-ray
machines that we all know from sitting in the dentist’s chair for
20 years. It wasn’t a conversion from a digital old technology to
new digital; it was really from X-ray technology to digital. And
in so doing, the patient interface, the way the machine wants to
have the patient oriented, was different enough that they chose to
redesign the way that it interacts with the patient. That required
about 15 different parts, and it was highly cosmetic because it’s
in a dentist’s office or a hospital.
So the cosmetic needs were high, there are multiple pieces,
and there’s some chemical resistance. This type of thing—that
the product had to withstand chemicals—is normal to the medical environment. And that package really just meant that the
alternative to the designers was injection molding, and pressure
forming just presented a much, much lower-cost alternative toolwise, and given that the volumes were relatively low to injection
molding volumes, it, overall, gave them a cost effective solution.
D2P: Is it possible to say what types of parts were made for
that product? Were they covers?
SM: They’re all the covers, yes. One thing: Generally, thermoforming is not structural; it’s generally cosmetic. One of the
innovations, as an aside to your innovations question, is trying to
find thermoplastic composites that are structural. That’s under
development and that will be coming. There’s a lot of it now, but
there’ll be more and more coming and there will be more that
will be practically priced.
Twin sheet is a structural product because of the hollow beam
strengths that you get out of twin sheet parts. So there are some
structural advantages compared to, as we say, a plain old die forming, or pressure forming, which is a single-sided part.
D2P: This product had nine mating and matching parts that
were developed concurrently, and you were able to optimize
the points of attachment to be “assembly friendly.” What went
into that process of optimizing the points of attachment so that
it could be assembled more easily?
SM: In general, there were no exposed fasteners. So in the
sequence of assembly, a part would have a hidden tab, and that
tab would be hidden by the next piece, incorporating that into
the design. Also, machining—by being able to machine the receiving insert, let’s say, and bonding it on the back of the part, it can
be adjusted for changes in the machine, difficulties in assembly.
It can be more iterative because with an injection molded part,
you have to decide where you want the points of attachments,
and they’re machined into the tool, and it’s difficult to change
those things. Here, you can change the blocks, alter the blocks,
for better fit and/or for some unforeseen change that they had
to make along the way. It’s not like a particular clever thing that
no one’s ever thought of; it’s more of design flexibility.
D2P: With regard to Profile’s work on this project, what were
you most proud of in terms of what you were able to achieve
for your customer?
SM: Well, for most of these projects, particularly multi-part
projects, the customers always come to the covers at the end,
largely because they don’t know what they’re putting covers on
until they finish the machine. So by definition, it’s at the end,
but they’re always up against a trade show, up against a formal
introduction that’s—from a corporate standpoint—carved in
stone. And so [we’re proud of] being able to develop these
simultaneously, get them all to fit together, and get them to the
customer on time.
One advantage of pressure forming is that you can make
the parts and paint the first ones to get them to the trade show.
Once we texture the tools, they save a lot of money by having
molded-in color and molded-in texture. But we can get them to
market faster with these multiple pieces. That was the significant
contribution to their project.
February 2014 • www.d2pmagazine.com
D2P: You mentioned earlier that the patient interfacing equipment needs to be on the larger side, which is an advantage for
your processes. Can you talk about any other advantages that
your thermoforming capabilities have for medical applications?
SM: I think that, typically, medical equipment has long lives,
and industrial equipment, certainly. As sort of blanket statement,
thermoforming does not do well in consumer products. We
do great in kids’ swimming pools, and sleds, and saucers, and
things like that, but in a durable good cover for consumers, the
consumer market changes too rapidly to make pressure forming
and thermoforming cost effective.
In the medical world, there tend to be 5- , 10- , and, believe
it or not, which is just amazing to me, there are some 20-year-old
medical devices that are still as robust as they were five or ten years
ago in terms of their sales volume, their applications. The long
tail on the products, I think, is what makes it very cost effective.
D2P: What are some other examples of applications that
you’ve done for the medical industry?
SM: “Carts” doesn’t sound technical enough, but there are
quite a bit of carts that have the computer and the smarts of the
piece of equipment, but that need to be taken to the bedside of
the patient. Everyone wants their cart to look a little different,
and they have consumables and different supplies that need to be
brought along with the cart, so you have to have different ways of
packaging them or putting them on board that cart. X-ray tables,
the diagnostics imaging technologies, the CT Scans, the MRIs,
those physically large pieces of equipment lend themselves well
to our process.
D2P: Besides aesthetics, what are some of the top concerns of
design engineers in making these products?
SM: Typically, there’s the aesthetic part of it on the computer
side, let’s say. But on the assumption that it may be a blood
analyzer, for example, there are a lot of moving parts and
lots of interaction between the machine operators and the
machine, so they need access points, they need clear windows
to view operations. Those are generally some of the concerns.
The trick is in how can you get as few parts as possible and still
cover all the critical areas of the machine.
It’s really sort of a triage of ‘This is what this machine has to
do.’ The machine designers haven’t finished their work; they just
know these tasks have to be incorporated, so it tends to be an
iterative process of ‘We could do it this way,’ and they say, ‘Well,
yeah, we could turn it this way and then that would allow this idea
to be incorporated into the design.’
So it’s a heavily interactive process. We don’t get many blueprints in—they’re not blueprints anymore—many CAD files in
anymore that say, ‘This is it; just quote it and tell us the price.”
No, it’s ‘Here, literally, is our napkin sketch. We see two pieces;
we see it doing this. Can you come in and work with us on it?’
D2P: That seems to be one of the company’s strong suits—the
design and engineering capabilities that you have to help
customers with.
SM: Yes. I think, relative to most companies in the industry, we
have a strong engineering department, which is good in product
design, and our sales people are sales engineers. So we have good
upfront experience. And I think we’re just as good when comes
down to actually doing the production tooling, the production
jigs and fixtures that it takes to make what was designed repetitive
and cost effective in the long run.
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D2P: How many people does Profile Plastics employ, and approximately how many engineers do you have on staff?
SM: We have been between 80 and 100 in number of employees, and we’re closer to 80 now than the 100. We have approximately 10 engineers.
D2P: Are they from different engineering backgrounds, like
mechanical engineering and plastics engineering?
SM: Yes, those are the two most common ones: chemical
engineering and mechanical engineering, and there’s also an
industrial engineer.
D2P: Profile also serves customers in the transportation and
industrial markets, making things like truck fascia and an
enclosure for programmable theater lighting. Can you tell us a
little bit about your work for either of these markets?
SM: The common point, of course, is that the parts generally
have to be physically large and we use the words ‘highly cosmetic’
because that generally leads it to pressure forming and moldedin color and a significant amount of molding detail that add to
the ‘value added’ of the design. We don’t do automotive exterior
parts for obvious reasons; it’s way too high a volume. But for
heavy truck and industrial applications, the industrial people are
the last ones to go from the metal boxes to all the benefits, appearance wise, of plastic covers, some because a lot of industrial
equipment’s in pretty rugged use, where it’s exposed to bumps
or bruises or chemical environments, or high temperature, that
type of thing. But as plastics get better and better in paneling for
high temperature and harsh environments, those applications
are converting over to plastic covers as well.
It seems that there’s a general need for a higher level of appearance in something as simple as a mold chiller, a functional
product that you wouldn’t think would have to be too high design,
but there are a lot of companies that see that as the way to differentiate their product from another product. So using plastic
design is one way to do that.
D2P: How do you see the future direction of Profile Plastics
taking shape?
SM: Well, I think the market niche is geared by sort of structural things, like, injection molding needs two tools, and some
process reasons. Whether the niche will grow largely depends on
the U.S. industrial base because we make parts for other people.
We used to make a lot of exercise equipment and, maybe five
years after we made parts and shipped them to assembly plants in
the Midwest, we started making parts and they would be shipped
to China.
Now, the whole machine comes in a box from China, so there
is no assembly in Chicago anymore and, as a result, we don’t make
parts and send them to China. They can make their own parts
and bring it all in in a box. So how significant is that trend, and
will that trend slow down? Your guess is as good as mine. We’d
like to think it will, but it’s got a pretty good head start.
But I think our type of products will be some of the last ones.
As for exercise equipment, actually, another thing happened
on the way to the ball. Exercise equipment got to be very big
business, so it no longer was a thousand or 2,000 a year; it was
10,000 a year. Well, that changes the economics. We would not
be doing that part today because the volume is so high. That’s
the normal evolution of our applications. We have to deal with
things that are physically large and relatively low volume, and if
they become very popular and get very large volume-wise, they
go to more efficient processes.