FFP Packaging Solutions, based in Northampton, UK, is one of the country’s leading converters and supplier of flexible packaging materials. Ongoing business expansion, including the recent installation of a new eight colour flexographic printing press has led to the need for additional slitting and rewinding capacity and a new Titan SR9-DT dual turret rewinder from Atlas Converting Equipment Ltd. will be installed in June 2012.
FFP has an extensive and impressive portfolio of innovative solutions in flexible packaging for food products and also serves the UK’s leading multiple retail chains. Earlier in 2012, the company picked up two gold awards for its innovative flexible packaging materials from the European Flexographic Industry Association (EFIA).
"We have had a close association with Titan slitter rewinders for many years," explained Tom Bewley, production manager for FFP Packaging Solutions. "Our existing Titan slitters have performed extremely well over the years and reliability has been second to none. So once we saw a demonstration of the new Titan SR9-DT twin turret rewinder at last year’s ICE Europe exhibition in Munich, in November, we were seriously impressed with what this machine could do for our high volume slitting requirements to meet expanding production," he confirmed.
The new Titan SR9 series slitter rewinder has been a great success since its launch in November 2011. Demonstrations at ICE Europe generated considerable interest and several machines have been sold over the last few months to converters in various countries.
The new Titan SR9 series slitter rewinder technology platform not only provides much higher performance and improved productivity, but also a more flexible and sustainable solution in slitting and rewinding.
In the development of the SR9 series, Atlas focused its product development strategy on achieving significant reductions in machine downtime for printers and converters, including reduced set change time, lower operator intervention and also reduction of costly waste materials, which all adds up to outstanding gains in productivity.
The concept of the Titan SR9 series platform features three separate machine modules of unwind, slitter and rewind sections. The idea being that a converter need only change the rewind section of the slitter from a duplex shaft (DS) to a single turret (ST) or dual turret (DT) configuration, to meet changing production requirements, without the need to change the existing unwind and slitting modules.
The dual shaft (DS) module was introduced at the drupa 2012 exhibition in Dusseldorf, Germany (3 to 16 May 2012) and will be followed by the single turret (ST) module later in 2012 for a wide range of flexible materials including plain, printed, coated or metallised films, laminates, paper, board and flexible packaging materials.
Innovative engineering design has led to the application for four patents on the Titan SR9 series, including the unique turret support device (TSD) for faster turret rotation on the DT model. Such advanced engineering design has led to significant improvements in the quality of slit reels and significant reductions in set-up procedures.
A newly designed linear tracking slitter (LTS) section ensures the shortest and constant web length between the knives and the rewind shafts for improved web control, giving the highest possible side wall quality of rewind reels and also reducing the possibility of waste material. The Titan SR9-DT to be installed at FFP will feature an electronic slit reel unloading system.
The Titan SR9-DT rewinder can process a wide range of flexible materials including plain, printed, coated or metallised film from 10 to 200 micron, a wide range of laminates and paper from 40 to 200 gsm at speeds up to 1000m a minute (3,300ft a minute). The minimum slit width can be as narrow as 20mm (less than 1in).