Third VAI Plant for Haier, now in Russia

Haier confirms the trust in Cannon Group, purchasing the third foaming line designed to use Vacumm Assisted Injection technology. This solution has been chosen after four years of positive results obtained with the first two v.a.i. plants operating in China.

​Haier’s new Russian refrigerator plant will open in April 2016 with an initial capacity of 250,000 unit/year —planned to be doubled in a second-phase project. According to local press, the investment in this new plant exceeds US$ 50 million, with an expected creation of 500 jobs.

Main market for the new factory will be domestic, Russia and CSI, with new models deriving from the successful line of energy-saving refrigerators developed in the past few years from the Chinese house holding’s giant Company.

V.A.I. Technology for high-quality refrigerators

​Energy efficient refrigerators are obtained through a smart combination of modern compressors and highly-efficient insulation. Haier has been producing them since 2011 with two Cannon foaming plants operating in China.

​A special feature of these foaming plants is represented by the use of negative pressure (vacuum) within the refrigerator’s wall cavity during the injection of the foam and the relevant filling time.

​By applying vacuum into mould cavity where a domestic refrigerator is filled with rigid Polyurethane, the V.A.I. technology facilitates the expansion of the foam into the cabinet, providing substantial benefits:​

• Increased productivity per foaming station: thanks to the use of highly-reactive formulations that provide a faster demoulding time, a 135-second curing cycle is now the reference for a wall thickness up to 10 cm
• Optimised distribution of foam throughout the whole cabinet: a uniform density of 33 +/-1 kg/m3 is constantly achieved
• Substantial foam savings: up to 6% are regularly obtained in a fine-tuned plant
• Optimum insulation performances: the foam Lambda value is as low as 18.6 +/- 1 mW/m °K with CycloPentane as blowing agent.