Closed loop tension control

Closed Loop Tension Control describes of the systems we use to accurately control the tension of materials running through slitting and winding machines; the simplest description of the process that I can come up with for the purposes of this blog post is thus:

When we utilise Closed Loop Tension Control on a machine load cell (sensors) are installed on key parts of the machine, these load cells measure the actual tension of the materials being wound as it passes through the machine. The information fed back from the load cells is then used by the control system to make precise adjustments to the machine to attain perfect tension throughout the slitting or rewinding process.

Now I'll be the first to admit that the above paragraph is hardly a snappy explanation of a process that is essential to controlling substrate tension, so I'm going to try and simplify even further by explaining why you might want closed loop tension control rather than explaining how it works (I often find that telling customers why a feature is useful is more pertinent than explaining how said feature works). So steel yourself, here comes the summary:

Why you might need Closed Loop Tension Control.
If the material you are winding or slitting stretches, distorts or winds poorly if put under too much (or too little) tension then Closed Loop Tension Control could be the answer to the problem.

Comments

Trim removal on slitters

A trim fan attached to a slitter. As discussed previously on this blog the process of slitting (at its most basic) can be reduced to the one-line description of ' a big roll is loaded on one side of the slitter rewinder, and smaller rolls are loaded off the other side' and that's fine... most of the time. Here comes the example! If a 1000mm wide roll is loaded onto a rewinder and is slit down into rolls that are 212mm wide then four rolls would be produced. If your mental maths is up to scratch you might have noticed that 4x212 does not equal 1000, and that means that from the original / master / jumbo roll there will be roughly 117mm left over. Sometimes this happens because the edges of jumbo rolls are discarded due to damage, print reasons or simply because the material being slit isn't coated all the way to the edges of the roll. So what happens to this waste material? Waste material can be wound onto cores in the same way 'correct' rolls are,

Slitter core alignment using lasers

Lasers and slitters go together like cheese and biscuits, and fitting laser scoring, cutting and perforation devices to slitter rewinders is something that has now become reasonably commonplace here in our factory, but lasers can do a lot more than cut and perforate. We've recently had a huge upsurge in interest in our ' ComputaCore ' laser core alignment system, and because it is such a simple system to control and operate it can be a little bit challenging finding many things to write about it - it's simple and it works very well! But what's in the box? We've made our laser core alignment kit as easy to fit as it is to operate, and to highlight the simplicity of this approach to perfect core alignment we've recently published a post on the subject on our blog here - https://www.universalconvertingequipment.com/laser-core-alignment-whats-in-the-kit-and-how-does-it-work We're planning a new promotional video for our laser core alignment syste

Skymark are using laser to stay head of the competition

The news has just gone public that Skymark Packaging Ltd have bought a Universal X6lp Laser perforation Slitter Rewinder for their facility in Scunthorpe, here in the UK. Skymark have recently been in the news for declaring that their experience of the flexible packaging market is particularly buoyant at the moment. Their reasoning is that following the Brexit vote, a lot of supply chain risk is being mitigated by companies processing more materials here in the UK. In addition to sharing common features with our X6 slitter, the X6lp can also laser perforate and produce easy open scribe lines. The easy open packaging systems are popular with producers who want their products to be consumer-friendly, but to still be able to protect the contents of the packaging.

Slitter Man

Search This Blog