The Engineering Business division of Uflex launched EL-1300 Extrusion Lamination Machine in 2016, which was well received by Indian convertors. In the wake of sustained demand, the company has carried out value-engineering to develop co-extrusion and tandem extrusion variants of the machine which was recently shown at an Open House in the Noida factory and which will be shown at PLASTINDIA 2018.
Ajay Tandon, president and CEO, Engineering Business, Uflex said, “To meet the principal application of extrusion coating/lamination, a mono extruder is good enough. However, considering the running costs and flexibility of playing with various polymers, co-extruders are gaining traction. In addition to economising costs, co-extruders also play an important role in enhancing barrier properties owing to multi-layered combinations. The tandem extruder is also being developed to execute multi-layered jobs in a single run for saving process time.”
At PLASTINDIA 2018, to be held from 7-12 February 2018 at Ahmedabad, Uflex will be showcasing its fully automatic co-extrusion laminator, which offers a lamination speed of 300 meters a minute, automatic thickness measurement and control, and corona treaters that seamlessly integrate treater into flexible packaging extrusion coating and lamination lines. The laminator features independent drives for all segments of the machine; it has a heavy duty structure and motorized 3-axis movement of carriage for air-gap setting with a chamber type doctor blade for anchor coating.
On the incremental value engineering practiced at Uflex, Tandon said, “We are going step by step. Initially we developed a co-extrusion laminator with an attainable speed of 250 meters per minute followed by the one with a speed of 300 meters per minute that we will be exhibiting at PLASTINDIA. In the times to come we plan to enhance the speed to 350 meters a minute and subsequently graduate to 400 meters per minute.”
Talking about the market demand, Sanjay Malik Sabharwal, head of production and marketing of converting machines at Uflex Engineering says, “In the field of laminated flexible packaging no other Indian manufacturer makes these types of extrusion lamination machines. There is clearly a big need gap for Uflex to tap this market. There is an increasingly encouraging demand for extrusion laminated packaging by multinational food and beverage brands in India and overseas alike. We have a good order pipeline and expect
to sell at least 6 to 8 machines in the coming year for this application. We have tied up with a subject matter technical expert from the western world having over 35 years of luminary experience in designing and running world class extrusion lamination machines for that market. This will help us making great strides in the international market as well.”
This article has been re-edited and re-posted on 24 January 2018
