Cleaner end products are just one of the advantages
Extrusion Lamination is getting increasingly popular over adhesive lamination owing to myriad benefits it offers such as alleviation of solvents/compounds used in adhesives, ruling out white base ink-printing of the ensuing laminate by using master-batch in the extrudate that renders it white and enhanced bond strength.
Taking cognisance of the popularity of extrusion lamination as a process, Engineering Business of India’s largest multinational flexible packaging materials and solution company Uflex launched EL-1300 Extrusion Lamination Machine in 2016, which was very well received by the Indian convertors’ fraternity. In wake of sustained demand, the company has been incessantly carrying out value-engineering to develop co-extrusion and tandem extrusion variants of the machine.
Mr Ajay Tandon, President & CEO, Engineering Business, Uflex says, “To meet the principal application of extrusion coating/lamination, Mono Extruder is good enough. However, considering the running costs and flexibility to play with various polymers, Co-Extruders are gaining traction. In addition to the costs, Co-Extruders also play an important role towards enhancing barrier properties owing to multi-layered combination. Tandem Extruder is also being developed so as to execute multi-layered jobs in single a run for saving the process time.”
Further elaborating about the benefits of the Co-extrusion Laminator, Mr. Tandon said, “This machine comes equipped with a back-pressure control system which enables to manage polymers of different MFI (Melt Flow Index) so as to maintain the homogeneity of the extrudate.”
Talking about the need for engineering co-extrusion laminator, he continued, “We developed co-extrusion laminators for the flexibility it offers towards using different combinations of co-polymers suiting the requirements of the customers in terms of better bond strength and barrier properties, keeping in mind the overall characteristics of the substrates to be laminated. Co-extruder combined with a suitable feed block enables the convertor to alter polymeric combination for the 3 layered extrudate. The combinations can be changed according to the needs of the ensuing laminate. For instance to get better bond strength one could use acid co-polymers on the two side layers and low cost additive in the central layer. The co-extruder that we will be exhibiting at PLASTINDIA can offer combinations like ABA, AAB and ABB.”
