India-based Uflex to showcase fully automatic co-extrusion machine

Indian flexible packaging materials and solution company Uflex will display its fully automatic co-extrusion machine at PLASTINDIA 2018, which will be held next month in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

The company’s engineering business launched the EL-1300 extrusion lamination machine last year due to the increased demand for extrusion lamination as a process.

Uflex has been engaged in value-engineering to develop co-extrusion and tandem extrusion variants of the machine.

With an attainable lamination speed of 300m/min, the machine has a lamination drum to maintain an even temperature across the width.

Uflex engineering business president and CEO Ajay Tandon said: “To meet the principal application of extrusion coating/lamination, a 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 economising 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 a single run for saving upon the process time.”

In addition to independent drives for all segments, the machine is said to have motorised three-axis movement of carriage for air gap setting.

According to Uflex, extrusion lamination offers improvements over adhesive lamination in terms of alleviation of solvents/compounds used in adhesives, as well as ruling out white base ink-printing of the ensuing laminate.

Extrusion lamination is also claimed to offer enhanced bond strength and consistent laminate production.