Brückner Servtec has achieved another huge milestone in the company’s history, by celebrating its 1,000th completed upgrading project. A successfully installed inline coater (ILC) at the 5-layer BOPP film stretching line of the Indian customer SRF marked this pivotal moment and strongly demonstrated the upgrade capabilities of the service company, founded in 2003.
Markus Gschwandtner, managing director, Brückner Servtec, says, “We are proud to reach this significant milestone with an upgrade for one of our most loyal and valued customers. It is the result of our daily efforts to continuously improve the performance and efficiency of our services which have always been customized long-term solutions for ensuring maximum availability, performance and efficiency of film stretching lines.”
SRF continues efforts to produce recyclable high-barrier film
The first inline coating (ILC) upgrade in India has been successfully completed at SRF by Brückner Servtec. Overall, it is the second inline coater in the Indian market. The project scope included the installation of an inline coater, which consisted of an integrated corona pre-treatment and the coating application system. It was positioned between the machine direction orientation (MDO) and the transverse direction orientation (TDO) of the line. The aim was to benefit from improved barrier properties, enabled high metal adhesion, a long-term stable treatment and optimized printability.
Brückner’s ILC technology is fully integrated into the production line and applies a thin, wet water-based chemical coating before the film is stretched and dried in the TDO. By applying this coating, a wide variety of possible film types and applications becomes available, while also replacing expensive offline coating processing steps.
The realization of the ILC installation under the existing, very tight space conditions at the production line was a significant achievement of the Brückner team. Finding and implementing a customized solution that resulted in a 90° deflection of the MDO film to the auxiliary winder, was crucial to the project success. In addition, the BOPP line has also been equipped with new Heating Cooling Units (HCU) for active cooling of the film prior to coating in the MDO. Moreover, the existing TDO preheating zone was modified with an additional airing zone to extract evaporated water from the drying process.
Since the start-up day, the 5-layer BOPP film stretching line has been producing inline coated film for high-barrier metalized film. This enables SRF to set a benchmark in sustainable film production by moving towards recyclable packaging. “The whole project was completed successfully, ahead of schedule, and the advanced inline-coated film was produced on the same day. Thanks to this technology, we are quite confident to be able to supply film for the circular economy in the near future,” explains Dinesh C Bhatt, vice president and unit head at SRF.
Sebastian Salentin, project manager at Brückner Servtec, adds, “This project proved once again, that every product line is unique and requires special solutions, which we have successfully fulfilled with our long-term upgrading and service expertise. The excellent and close cooperation between the Brückner and SRF teams even allowed a shortened commissioning time and an earlier start-up”.
After the successful product refinement, the inline-coating technology is now also being upgraded on another BOPP line of SRF in Thailand, underlining again SRF’s trust in the innovative and sustainable technologies of Brückner.