Digital Printing Upgrade and a Second Digital Laser Cutter

InkWorks can use either of its 15-in.-wide LasX systems for either roll-to-roll or roll-to-sheet operations. The roll-to-sheet capability comes in mighty handy with two types of labels produced by InkWorks. One is where the customer’s volume requirements are relatively low. “Some of the smaller food manufacturers, or maybe a craft brewer, find it easier to pull pressure-sensitive labels from a sheet and manually apply them to containers than to bother with a roll of labels,” says Travis. “We make labels for pouches, for example, where the customer needs 1,000 of one label, 10,000 of another and 5,000 of a third. Customers find the sheet format easier to handle.”

When these sheets of pressure-sensitive labels are in production, the laser kiss-cuts the labels on the release liner and then it cuts a deeper cut to separate individual sheets from the roll. Number of labels per sheet depends entirely on the customer’s requirements.

The other application where roll-to-sheet is in demand is where in-mold labels are concerned because it makes it possible to cut and stack individual labels that customers can conveniently load into the magazine feed of their injection-molding machines. Such labels are typically a two-layer lamination of 0.5-mil and 2.6-mil polypropylene (PP). The digitally printed 2.6-mil substrate fuses with the bottle sidewall in the mold, and the clear .5-mil layer traps the inks so they can’t be scratched off.

Read about the latest digital press installed by Tetra Pak.

Both LasX systems operate in fundamentally the same way. When a 2D bar code printed along the edge of the roll gets scanned, it sends that identifying information to the LasX software, which then pulls the digital file needed to cause the laser to cut the appropriate shape. “It’s non-stop,” says Travis. “A circle, a square, a rectangle, a triangle, or whatever shape we need to cut. And every time a new shape is called for, the digital system immediately picks that up and changes its cutting mode with no need whatsoever to change cutting tools of any kind.”The Combi Pack Ready Laminator offers both solventless adhesive or thermal lamination.

One significant capability in the second LasX system operating at InkWorks revolves around how the laser-cut units are handled in roll-to-part production. It involves the integration of LasX’s patented stainless steel vacuum processing belt with two Dorner conveyors. The stainless steel belt makes it possible for the laser to accurately register the digitally printed web on the fly and through-cut the web, thus creating each part. The fully cut parts are then delivered from the laser area to the first downstream Dorner unit, which is an inverted vacuum conveyor. The vacuum conveyor carries the parts from the stainless steel conveyor onto the secondary Dorner belt conveyor. The servo driven rewind shaft collects the webbed scrap matrix. The speed of the second Dorner conveyor is variable and can shingle or space the parts. Counting of the parts is done automatically so the secondary conveyor accelerates to create a space to indicate to the operator the stack count has been reached. All that remains is for an operator to bag the parts into cartons for shipment to the customer.

“It’s much more fluid than how we’re doing it on the first LasX system,” says Travis. “On that system the machine extracts parts from the web by redirecting the web path after cutting and allowing the cut-through labels or sheets to be captured by a nip that feeds the parts onto a conveyor. If the labels are very small or extremely thin, they wrap up on the nip rollers or they get jammed up. The new vacuum conveyor system completely eliminates these issues. We learned a lot with that first machine. Then, by working closely with LasX, they were able to design just what we needed this time around. It’s just an amazing machine.”

PACK EXPO Las Vegas and Healthcare Packaging EXPO (Sept. 27-29, Las Vegas Convention Center) will reunite the packaging and processing community. With over 1400 exhibitors, no other event in 2021 will bring together a more comprehensive gathering of suppliers offering new products, technologies and solutions. Attendee registration is now open.