Case Studies

The Challenge

A Dutch customer who specialized in the production of very large agricultural covers in polyethylene requested a fully automatic multiple-roll welding station with hot air technology. The machine we created would be required to create sheets of infinite lengths with overlaps and left and right pockets with a rope insertion. Fabric came from two heavyweight bobbins, with widths up to 2,9 m. Off-cut material would need to be rewound so that it could be reused on the same machine. The final challenge was the customer request to develop a rewinder for the extremely weighty finished products, a job made even more complex by the rope insertions on either side of the sheets.

The Solution

After several months of planning and development, we constructed the SM-450-SA – a heavy duty unwinding and welding station. The core of the machine was a heat-resistant, vacuumed conveyor belt that keeps the fabric under continuous control during the welding cycles. The polyethylene sheets are pulled off the rolls by the force of a very powerful vacuum turbine and assisted by two motorized unwinding systems with digital fabric tension control and edge control that automatically and continuously monitor and correct the position of the fabric during the feeding with a precision of millimeters.

A range of specifically designed heavy duty hot air welding heads allow for the creation of highly durable seams. The finished product, extremely long sheets with left and right pockets with rope, were then rewound into heavy but manageable bobbins by a specifically designed, heavy duty rewinding station.

Continuous cycles. Strong seams.

Prior to purchasing the SM-450-SA, this customer had been using high frequency and impulse welders. With the continuous welding and cutting cycles of SM-450-SA machine, the company significantly increased its hourly production output while drastically reducing the effort required to operators.

The SM-450-SA is working double shifts in this customer’s facilities in the Netherlands.