Great success for Laem System at Drupa 2012

At their stand in Drupa, Laem System showed how to enhance productivity through a highly automated system located at the bottom step of a packaging production facility.

Laem System displayed a slitter-rewinder featuring full automatic positioning of the slitting heads, automatic motorized displacement of a laser beacon unit for quick core positioning, 4 rewinding differential shafts for nonstop productions and automatic reel extractor that delivers the finished reels onto a fully automatic unloading device. This device turns 90° and pushes the finished reels to the edge of unloading arms where a robot collects and puts the reels on a pallet. The perfect use of this fully automatic system reaches the top when also bar codes to close the finished reels are used: in this way the customer orders can be managed from the operator panel of the slitter-rewinder or from PC and robot palletizing them correctly. At the Laem System exhibition area, visitors also could see a Smoov ASRV (Automatic Storage Retrieval Vehicle) that took the pallet of finished reels to a complete automatic warehouse, where also jumbo rolls where stored.

Laem System strive continuously to achieve new and advanced technological solutions for achieving – just through the expectable nature and features of the machines – high, consistent and possibly unique production quality results, large production volumes (through machine speed kept usually high) and low downtime. The whole staff of Laem System – technical offices, workshop, marketing and management included – operates in full harmony, and let’s say in friendship as a single team, knowing that their ultimate advantage is customer satisfaction. The background is that of Casale Monferrato, Italy, one of the most renowned areas in the world for the production of printing presses, coating/laminating machines and slitter-rewinders.

Thanks to these achievements and this fertile background, Laem System had been contracted worldwide to manufacture a high variety of special machines for converting industry.

For example, two high-tech slitter-rewinders had been supplied together in 2009 to the French film manufacturing plant of Japanese group Toray. They can unwind jumbo rolls up to 4,000 mm wide, taking them from an automatic storage and handling system. Before slitting, the web undergoes a light knurling to prevent side slipping in the finished rolls. This treatment is useful especially for fine PET (4 to 75 µm). All of the rollers of the machine body are motorized, in order to ensure ideal tension control along the whole web path. With these two machines – in substitution for three machines that were installed by another manufacturer – this French plant has achieved greater productivity while producing high quality rolls.

Another remarkable example is the slitter-rewinder with on-line cold embossing which has been delivered last year to Germany, with hi-productivity features such as: individual displacement of the unwinding arms, cold embossing unit designed to treat challenging materials such as aluminium / BOPP laminates, two rewinding shafts (one in operation and one on stand-by) carrying the slitting heads by either razor blades or circular knives, automatic changeover of the finished rolls. Extremely precise web tension control is maintained through the whole machine, even with different diameters among the rewinding rolls.

Our last example is the double centre folder DCF4 installed in Canada for processing shrink film. This prototype has been designed for the converting industry to perform two subsequent folds and a longitudinal slit in the same production job. The machine is actually able to hold shrink film reels measuring between 1,200 and 2,500 mm wide on a turret unwinder, perform a first and a second folding according to values pre-set on the operator panel, slit the material and wind the reels on two independent shafts. This machine is unique in its field, being capable of performing jobs that would normally be assigned to three separate machines: a slitter-rewinder for shrink film and two traditional single-folders.

Thanks to the vast experience acquired in these years, Laem System engineers are now able to customize solutions to meet the challenging demands of the converting market worldwide.