Gefran at K 2025: green, smart and connected solutions for the plastics industry

With over fifty years of experience and consolidated application know-how, Gefran offers technologies that can increase the performance of extrusion, injection and blow moulding machines, with immediately noticeable results throughout the production cycle.
These include an advanced application for fully electric injection moulding machines, which uses the braking resistors of the inverters to recharge internal batteries and redistribute energy during the machine cycle, reducing absorption peaks, stabilising consumption and optimising the management of electrical components.

The ability to offer complete automation solutions enables Gefran to support OEMs and system integrators with concrete and measurable technologies that enable digital transformation and accompany the transition to more sustainable production processes.

At the heart of Gefran’s offer is G-Mation, an EtherCAT-based platform that simplifies automation architectures, reducing development times and integration costs.
The heart of the solution is the G-Mation P6 controller, designed to combine high performance and flexibility, with cycle times of up to 250 µs, native protocols (MQTT, OPC UA, Euromap), secure connections via integrated VPN agents and Docker architecture for installing applications as “apps”, making automation modular and scalable.

For machine builders, this translates into faster development of custom solutions, with predefined templates that accelerate design and configuration and the ability to expand functions without redesigning the entire system.
G-Mation allows you to configure extrusion, thermoforming or injection moulding lines, optimise the supervision of thermal and mechanical cycles, integrate digital services such as predictive maintenance and consumption analysis, and reduce time-to-market thanks to an open, ready-to-use infrastructure.

The collaboration with 40Factory, an Italian scale-up with shares held by Gefran and specialising in Industrial IoT services and platforms, has resulted in two specific solutions for the plastics industry. The first is MAX (Machine Analytics eXpert), which transforms machine data into immediately usable insights, improving energy efficiency, reducing downtime and enabling predictive maintenance. The second is GAIA (Gefran AI Assistant), a virtual assistant based on generative AI that supports operators and maintenance technicians in their daily management, providing contextual answers on machine status, consumption, performance and technical documentation.

At the Gefran booth, visitors will be able to see real applications on extrusion and injection moulding machines, already adopted by leading OEMs.

To ensure high performance, a plastics machine must accurately monitor every process variable. Gefran is presenting a range of sensors designed to combine accuracy, reliability and sustainability. Thanks to intelligent measurements of position, pressure, temperature, deformation and force, even in high-stress environments, it is possible to reduce machine downtime through predictive maintenance, optimise the use of raw materials and reduce consumption, with a direct impact on production costs.

In plastic processing, energy and heat control is a key element. This is why Gefran offers the new GRC power controllers, which are compact and versatile and integrate advanced functions such as Smart Load Management for power peak management, predictive diagnostics based on Digital Twin and remote supervision via webserver. In addition, the GRx family of solid-state relays guarantees precision and continuity even in fast and repetitive cycles, with compactness and ease of integration for new generation machines.