At IndiaPlast 2019, Carbon Light displayed its range of carbon fiber rollers. The company manufactures carbon fiber rollers for the printing and packaging industries, blown film extrusion lines, slitting and converting applications, and non-woven applications (eg., textile industry). Carbon Light is the first company in India to manufacture carbon fiber rollers.
“Being the first in the industry, we face many problems as people in India are not quite familiar with carbon fiber rollers since all these years they were using aluminum, rubber or MS rollers. So now we are trying to tap the OEMs who basically sets the ground. Right now, we are providing our carbon fiber rollers to Pelican, Kabra, Kalpvrux Converting, Galaxy, Uflex and more. And these companies have started realizing the advantages of using carbon fiber rollers in their machines,” said Rini Bansal, business development engineer at Carbon Light.
“Using carbon fiber rollers can increase line speeds significantly. That is because these rollers are quite light in weight and the stiffness is very high. The moment you press stop your machine, it gets stopped instantly due to its low moment of inertia thereby not dragging along the film – this is something you cannot achieve using aluminum and MS rollers. Instant stopping of the roller leaves the film scratch free,” explained Bansal.
Although the company started manufacturing carbon fiber rollers some six years ago, it started promoting itself for the first time at the PlastIndia exhibition in 2018. “After PlastIndia 2018, in past one year, we have received a very good response from the market. Machine manufactures are appreciating the kind of potential these rollers can offer to their machines. With carbon fiber rollers, they are able to achieve much higher efficiency with performance of the same machine, which was earlier using normal rollers, going up significantly in terms of speeds, accuracy and better sensitivity on films. Also, vibration caused by the machine can affect the film. Rollers constitute about 80 to 85% of the vibration in the machine. Using carbon fiber rollers this can be reduced greatly.”
Speaking about the challenges, Bansal said, “All these years, it was more about educating ourselves first and then educating the customers because these rollers are quite new not only to the Indian market but to us as well. Fortunately, since our parent company has more than 30 years of experience in carbon fiber winding, we used that experience and started understanding customer requirements.”
Bansal said that Carbon Light’s objective of participating at IndiaPlast 2019 is to make end users understand about carbon fiber rollers. “When end users understand the benefits of the carbon fiber rollers, they automatically ask the manufacturers to provide machines with carbon fiber rollers.”