A different kind of 'film'-making

Uflex understood the ever-swelling demand for packaging films in North America at an appropriate time. Commissioned in 2013, the Kentucky plant is the result of this very understanding. Currently, the USD 1 billion company has five overseas operations for manufacturing packaging films, in the US, Poland, Egypt, Mexico and UAE.

 

Flex Films (USA), the indirectly wholly owned subsidiary of Uflex Limited, houses an 8.7-metre Bi-axially Oriented Polyethylene Terephthalate (BOPET) film line that runs at 500 metres per minute, with a production capacity of 30,000 MT per annum. It is supplemented by a plasma-enhanced high-barrier vacuum metalliser that can produce around 11,000 MT of metallised film per year.

The BOPET film manufacturing facility is ranked among one of the most technologically advanced packaging film lines in the US, which by far is world’s largest and most sophisticated market for packaging films and products.

 

The thickness of the films produced at the plant ranges from eight to 50 microns. The jumbo rolls of films are either 72,000 metre or 10,000 kg in weight, or both. It takes about three hours to manufacture the jumbo roll. The quantity of the film depends on diameter of the rolls.

The process

The process of production is not very different from what is being done in India, equally impressive and sophisticated is the outlook. For raw material, the company purchases PET chips from three outlets – two are Indian and one American. Nearly 90% of the raw material (bright and speciality chips) comes from within the US and only the balance is imported.

 

The raw material is poured into big silos. Flex Films (USA) has silos of different capacities, ranging from 400 tonnes (three silos), 40 tonnes (two silos) and 20 tonnes (two silos). Small silos are used for speciality chips.

 

The drying

These silos are attached to automatic and programmable feeding machines that send the chips to the drying and crystallising unit, the ductless heat pump (DHP) to remove the moisture from the raw material and to crystallise it. The softening temperature of the chips is 69 degrees Celsius and the melting temperature is 240-250 degrees Celsius. The crystallisation helps make the raw material non-sticky during drying. Otherwise, it may stick and obstruct the flow.

 

Melting and casting

Thereafter, the dried chips are fed into the extruder that performs the function of mixing, melting, metering and pumping the material uniformly. Dried and crystallised material goes into melting chambers where electric heaters (with temperature of around 280 degrees Celsius) melt the chips to turn them viscous.

 

In the next step, the viscous material goes through two filters – the primary filter sieves impurities of 40 microns and above while the secondary filter stops impurities up to 25 microns. The layers of the melt (co-extruded and core) are combined into one single layer in the feed block and that uniform layer of melt emerges from the die and then on to the casting drum (chill roll). Chillers with cold water maintain temperature of around 12 degrees Celsius on the surface of the roll.

 

The co extruder works parallel to the main extruder on vacuum principle. The two co extruders are placed on either sides of the main extruder.

 

Flex Films (USA) uses high voltage pinning system to make casting system uniformly flat across the width avoiding any air entrapment. The pinning system bombards the film with electrons and charges it. This keeps the polymer flat. It also has a thickness controller to control the thickness of the film emerged after casting.

 

Thereafter, the film passes through the machine direction orientation (MDO) section. Here, the film is pre-heated above the glass transition temperature of BOPET (70 degree Celsius). After pre-heating, the film is stretched up to 3.5 times. Infrared rays are used in the stretching section for uniform heating.

 

From the MDO section, the film goes to the coating section where chemical is coated onto it as per the specifications of the customer. The coating is done through gravure roll process. From the MDO section, the film goes to the transverse direction orientation (TDO) section where it is stretched in transverse direction. To begin with, the film is pre-heated so that it can be stretched easily and uniformly. After preheating, the film is stretched up to 4.5 times in the transverse direction. During the process of stretching, the molecular orientation is disturbed and therefore the film is heated up to 230 degrees Celsius in the crystallisation chamber. Thereafter, to streamline the alignment of molecules the film is gradually cooled.

Developing a new product or technology is a complicated and lengthy process. In this, you will have to invariably place the focal point on your customers. Delay in customer acceptance could result in shortening the period of the commercial benefit arising during products’ life cycle.

 

It takes around six months for a new customer to come onboard, or an existing customer to accept a new product. For multinationals, it may take even more and the process may be yet difficult. Clients validate several parameters before taking a decision and placing the order. This takes time. Vendor selection is a serious issue, so is customer selection.
 

Talking about customers, as we are in B2B space, stakeholders are all well informed about quality and technology advancement. Everybody keeps a track of raw material prices. Client acquisition is a rather rigorous exercise. We hold discussions on different levels – technology, applications, machines, end use of packaging and several others.

 

The focus

Sometimes the focus is on functionality; sometimes cost-effectiveness takes the front seat. There is a growing concern among brands about counterfeiting that erodes their hard-earned equity. Anti-counterfeiting solutions are a must today. Eco-friendliness of packaging solutions has also caught on in the recent years. We have to focus on anything and everything that our client could demand. If innovation does not cover anti-counterfeiting and eco-friendliness, one cannot sustain.

Value of innovation

Patents are more of recognition rather than a business proposition. Innovation does give you an edge over your competition. Take the example of our waterproof WPP building material packaging bag. It looks simple from the exterior, but only we know how difficult it was to engineer it. The efforts may not be visible when you see the product, but the hard work that went into making it make all the difference. It takes time, sincere efforts and resources to achieve superior innovation. Otherwise, anyone would do it!

 

Look at the pet food market. The pet owners love their pets and care about their food, among other things. Since a pet food packet is big and the material cannot be consumed in a day, it has to be preserved. Earlier, the consumers would just fold the mouth of the pack or perhaps clip it. Then we started offering bags with re-closable zippers to obviate this problem. The zippers you see in the snack packs of Haldiram’s are patented by us.

 

To sum up, I will say that unrelenting innovation with a focused approach to add value to the business of your clients will eventually do the trick.