Strictly-Extrusion

Deceuninck, the Belgian-owned window profile extruder, has reported a 10% increase in sales for 2005. The preliminary figures, which do not include profits, indicate that fourth quarter sales rose by 19% to E169m – contributing to a final-year turnover of E643.8m. Sales in Europe grew by 3%, dragged down by sluggish markets in the UK and Germany. Eastern Europe grew by 17%, while Turkey – with 65% growth – was the strongest performing market. Exchange rates and divested businesses contributed 2.1% for the year, while volumes increased by 2.7%.Final results will be announced in March, said the company.

Davis-Standard, LLC now offers gearcase retrofits for non Davis-Standard brand extruders. The additional service has been well received by customers as many old gearcase brands are no longer supported by the original manufacturer. This makes repair and maintenance nearly impossible and can turn into a very costly endeavor both in downtime and parts expenses.
Davis-Standard provides the required technical drawings and on-site service to ensure a smooth retrofit that adds years of productivity to existing extruders. Typically there is some retrofitting required at the extruder base, and in some instances a visit by a service engineer is required to obtain specific measurements prior to order acceptance. Customers with in-house retrofit capabilities are often able to fit the box themselves.
To reduce downtime, Davis-Standard offers short turnaround times. The timeline depends on the type of retrofit, but can be done in as quickly as one to two weeks. Davis-Standard also supplies replacement screws, advanced screw designs and barrels for non Davis-Standard extruders. For more information, contact Bill Houle at bhoule@davis-standard.com

Battenfeld Gloucester has installed what it says is the first cast stretch line in Ukraine. The customer was HekroPET which purchased one five-layer 3 metre wide line for simultaneous production of six 500 mm wide rolls. Battenfeld Gloucester product manager David Finnemore said: “This line is a state of the art model among stretch film lines, especially in view of its high output and line speed capability of up to 600 metres per minute.” He said the market for cast stretch film in the CIS region is about 80,000tpa and this is forecast to grow by more than 8% annually. The turnkey line supplied by Battenfeld Gloucester includes two 90 mm and two 130 mm Contracool extruders. Each is equipped with its own screen changer and gravimetric feeding unit for four or five components, which gives a total net line production capacity of up to 1,800 kg/hour. Other equipment includes feed block and automatic flat film die from Cloeren, in-line edge trim reclaim system, infra-red thickness measuring, and a fully automatic dual turret winder.

Davis-Standard, LLC recently introduced a high pressure version of its popular KXP horizontal roll film coating laminating system to address more complex applications. The upgraded system, available with three to four rolls, is designed for producing intricate layered structures used in medical products, lithium batteries and other demanding multi-layer and mono layer film or thin sheet applications.
“This product is already well accepted by customers, but we wanted to extend its capabilities to address precision laminated or coated structures,” said Simon Dominey, business area manager of Davis-Standard’s laboratory and specialty systems group. “It is ideal for applications where you want to use calendaring type production for making ultra thin films or in complex arrangements where multiple layers are laminated together.”
The system features a high nip pressure option of 800 pli (pounds per linear inch) of force between the two primary rolls. It also includes a high pressure laminating option for the auxiliary rubber roll with an operating pressure of up to 200 pli. Special configurations are available for maintaining exact roll diameters, concentricity and roll gap. Davis-Standard supplies the complete system including extruders, payoffs/unwinds and take-ups/winders.
For more information, contact Simon Dominey at sdominey@davis-standard.com.

ENTEK Extruders is a leading manufacturer of Co-rotating twin screw extruders based in Oregon, USA, with offices in Europe, East Coast USA and Singapore. ENTEK’s current developments include a novel method of colouring profiles in wood plastic composite or fibre plastic composite to give the product a ‘Wood Grain Effect’. This technology has been developed to satisfy the need for direct extrusion lines to provide in-line colouring of the profile to give the look and effect of grained coloured wood. The Process involves adding a number of base colours into the polymer matrix to provide the background colour of the wood. Then coloured ‘Streakers’ are added at a strategic location along the twin screw extruder barrel to facilitate the resultant ‘Streaked’ effect in the profile, giving it the ‘Wood Grain’ look. This ‘Streaked’ effect penetrates through the thickness of the extruded profile thus giving it the look of natural wood without any additional surface laminates or machining processes. This technology was developed in ENTEK’s Twin Screw Extruder Technical Centre at its Headquarters in Oregon, USA. This facility is available to customers to develop their own processes as well as complete customer trials.

German PE film extrusion major Nordenia is being acquired by private equity group Oaktree Capital Management for an undisclosed sum in a deal expected to close during the first quarter. Nordenia is one of Europe’s leading flexible packaging suppliers with 3,000 employees and a 2005 turnover of E430m. Consultancy AMI, which listed the leading film extruders in its latest review of the Top 50 in Europe, puts the company in around sixth place and points to its strength in central Europe as well as further afield in Asia. “The film and flexible packaging market offers great growth potential,” said Hermann Dambach, managing director of Oaktree GmbH in Frankfurt, part of the LA-based equity firm which has $29bn (E24bn) under its management. Nordenia chief executive Ralph Landwehr, who will remain in place, said the take-over will enable the firm to grow both organically as well as by bolt-on acquisitions.

Kuraray Co., Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan, has broken ground for a commercial plant to manufacture Kurarister film, a clear, high-barrier film for retort food packaging. First announced at the end of August, Kurarister is a polyester film coated with a nanocomposite believed to be based on Kuraray’s Eval EVOH high-barrier resin. It boasts oxygen transmission of less than 1 cc/sq meter/day. The company is building a plant in Japan to produce 50 million sq meters/yr. It will open in July.

US-based MonoSol is to invest in a new extrusion line at MonoSol AF, the UK company formerly called Aquafilm which it acquired in 2004.MonoSol is following a growth strategy that has seen it just complete a relocation of its headquarters from Portage to Merrillville, both in Indiana. This move allowed an expansion of the company’s laboratories and R&D capabilities in Portage. The factory in Worcestershire will receive a state-of-the-art blown extrusion line to complement the existing production lines. This will increase capacity to meet the growing demand for water soluble laundry bags as well as detergent and packaging films.

A new technique for making flexible printed circuit boards (PCBs) will be unveiled in Japan next month. The Smartweb sputter metallising system from Applied Films of Germany will be seen at the Internepcon show in Tokyo on 18-20 January. It can coat 12 micron thick PET and polyimide films with standard copper seed layers of less than 200nm in continuous production. The system allows double sided metallisation in a two-pass production, says the company. It is less than 2.5m high and can easily be integrated into the production environment. Applied Films claims that the system is an improvement on the traditional casting and laminating processes used to make flexible copper-clad laminates. The company’s technology for making colour shift layers on plastics films – which change colour depending on the viewing angle – recently won an award at the International Converting Exhibition.

Uniplast International Inc., USA, supplier of dies and vacuum calibration systems used in vinyl window extrusion, has changed its name to Greiner Extrusion U.S. Inc. — reflecting its link to Austrian parent company, Greiner Extrusionstechnik GmbH as it unifies under a single, global name. Greiner has plants in China, Austria, the United States and the Czech Republic. The company is refining its vision of global manufacturing of what is ultimately a local product that demands local tweaking to get the finished profile correct. Window profiles are challenging to extrude because they have thin walls and a complex shape, with many walls both thick and thin. Most of Greiner’s dies and calibration equipment — lengthy post-extrusion lines that vacuum size and cool the profile — are shipped over from Austria, but must be fine-tuned by hand in Meadville before being installed at a customer’s factory.Uniplast was formed in 1989 as a joint venture between Greiner and Meadville tool and die maker Sipco Inc. Greiner, of Nussbach, Austria, bought out Sipco’s 30 percent share in 2001, and kept the Uniplast name.