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Home / 2026 R&D Focus: Innovations required in the field of plastic injection machines

2026 R&D Focus: Innovations required in the field of plastic injection machines

2025/12/29 By le zhan

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In 2026, customers’ criteria for evaluating plastic injection machines will no longer focus solely on peak power, but rather on the total cost of producing parts and their environmental footprint. Therefore, future innovations in plastic injection machine technology will primarily focus on creating smarter, more environmentally friendly, and more adaptable machines. This new research and development direction is market-driven: buyers will ask three questions before purchasing an injection molding machine – “What are the operating costs?”, “How adaptable is it to material variations?”, and “How easy is it to integrate with our digital factory?” Answering these questions requires focused innovation in energy systems, motion control, digitalization, material handling, reliability, and user experience.

2026 Plastic Injection Machines Market Drivers and R&D Priorities

The market drivers for plastic injection machines in 2026 include economic, regulatory, and customer expectations factors. First, manufacturers face rising energy costs and carbon emission accounting requirements, which are driving them to reduce energy consumption per part. Second, circular economy initiatives are increasing the use of blended and recycled raw materials – materials that require flexible machine control. Third, supply chain and labor shortages are making automated, self-optimizing machines more attractive. Therefore, R&D priorities must align with these drivers.

Expected specific R&D priorities:

Energy Consumption per Part Targets: Setting measurable energy consumption targets, for example, reducing the kilowatt-hours per part under typical cycle conditions and investing in high-efficiency servo drives, heat recovery systems, and low-loss hydraulic systems.

Material Flexible Control Algorithms: Developing adaptive injection curves that can handle variations in viscosity, filler content, and moisture without requiring operator adjustments.

Integrated Digital Services: Creating machine architectures designed for data collection, remote commissioning, and predictive maintenance to reduce downtime and unlock new service revenue.

The realization of this technology can bring several business advantages, including reduced operating costs for end-users; shorter start-up times for new resins or molds; and differentiation through lifecycle services and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).

Integrated Digital Services

Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Innovations in Plastic Molding Machines

By 2026, energy efficiency will be one of the most important purchasing criteria for plastic injection machines. To meet increasingly stringent ESG targets and reduce operating costs, injection molding machine manufacturers must innovate in electrical, hydraulic, and thermal systems.

Topstar predicts that the following areas will require significant innovation:

All-electric and hybrid architectures: Expanding the application of servo-electric technology in clamping, injection, and other areas to eliminate idle losses in hydraulic systems. Hybrid systems can combine the advantages of both.

Regenerative drives and energy recovery: Implementing regenerative braking on moving masses and capturing waste heat to control mold temperature, thereby improving the factory’s energy balance.

Low-pressure, high-speed injection strategies: Employing more precise motion control to achieve the same filling effect at lower average pressures, thus reducing heat generation and motor load.

Intelligent standby and micro-sleep modes: Integrating intelligent standby functions to reduce power consumption during unavoidable downtime while maintaining fast restart and thermal stability.

These important energy-efficiency innovations will reduce customers’ operating costs and carbon emissions, thereby enhancing sales appeal. In turn, R&D focused on system-level energy recovery will create cross-selling opportunities for thermal management components and services.

Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Innovations in Plastic Molding Machines

More advanced motion control and servo technology

The precision, repeatability, and speed of an injection molding machine depend on the quality of its motion control. By 2026, advancements in servo drives, sensors, and control software will be crucial.

Potential R&D directions include:

High-bandwidth servo control: Developing control loops with lower latency and higher speed to more precisely manage screw acceleration, injector positioning, and clamp movement. This helps improve shot-to-shot consistency and reduce defects.

Direct drive and low-friction mechanics: Exploring direct drive screws and clamping actuators to reduce backlash and hysteresis present in gearbox or toggle switch systems.

Adaptive closed-loop injection: Utilizing sensor fusion (pressure, position, acoustic emission, and cavity sensors) to dynamically adjust speed and pressure profiles during the first shot and subsequent cycles.

Micro-stepping and quasi-continuous motion: Developing motion profiles that avoid abrupt changes that lead to melt degradation; smooth acceleration curves extend screw life and reduce shear forces.

This improved motion control reduces scrap, improves cycle-time predictability, and enables the use of new high-performance resins that require precise shear and thermal control.

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Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Twins

Digitalization is reshaping manufacturing; by 2026, plastic injection molding machine must be designed as nodes in smart factories. R&D must focus on enabling data-driven operations and practical AI applications.

Future injection molding machines can incorporate embedded telemetry and secure cloud integration, streaming real-time metrics to cloud services for analysis and remote support via standardized data models (OSGi/OPC-UA, MQTT). Predictive maintenance and anomaly detection can be enabled by training machine learning models to predict component failures (servo motors, heaters, valve blocks) based on time-series features, driving proactive maintenance. Digital twin technology can optimize process flows by building accurate digital models of machines, molds, and materials to simulate the injection molding cycle and virtually optimize gating, holding pressure, and cooling. Twin feedback accelerates mold trials and shortens certification cycles.

Through digital integration, these capabilities can significantly reduce downtime, accelerate new mold start-ups, and generate subscription revenue for analytics and remote services.

Material and Process Flexibility Innovation

Material diversity is increasing: biopolymers, post-consumer recycled materials, and highly filled compounds are all appearing on production lines. Plastic injection machines must be able to handle variations in rheology and sensitivity.

Therefore, R&D needs to focus on a wide range of screw and barrel designs. Developing modular screw and barrel segments optimized for low-shear, high-shear, and filled materials is crucial. Quick-change screw assemblies minimize downtime. Active moisture control and drying integration should also be developed, integrating intelligent drying/feeding systems with moisture sensors that communicate with the machine to adjust residence time and injection profiles.

Additionally, adaptive thermal control should be incorporated, using zoned barrel and mold temperature control combined with predictive models to anticipate thermal lag, improving stability for heat-sensitive resins. A process recipe manager can then be built into the injection molding machine, allowing the machine to automatically adjust injection profiles based on material fingerprints (viscosity, MFI), including recipes for recycled blends. This flexible machine enables processors to switch SKUs faster, shorten material certification times, and expand the range of acceptable raw materials.

Achieving Smarter and More Practical Digitalization

The research and development direction for injection molding machines in 2026 is clear: while improving machine material adaptability, reliability, and ease of operation, the focus will be on achieving system-level efficiency, smarter control, and more practical digitalization. Specifically, injection molding machine manufacturers should prioritize reducing energy consumption per unit, increasing servo motion bandwidth, applying digital twins and predictive maintenance, and implementing material-aware process automation.

 

 

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