CBC COATING PLANT RELIES ON REMOVABLE ELECTRODE MAGAZINE TO GET THE JOB DONE.
CBC Coatings, a division of Riverside Paper Corporation in Appleton, Wisconsin, coats paper and film substrates to produce tag and label, wall-coverings and other coated products. CBC Coating specializes in the development and application of water based coatings. CBC is capable of coating both sides of a sheet in a single process operation. This operation incorporates Pillar Technologies corona treating equipment. Earlier this year, CBC was faced with the challenge of working a corona treater into their existing two-station coating line operation. They needed to find a company that had an experienced engineering department, a company that was willing to work closely with their systems integrator to find a feasible and cost-effective solution.
Mr. Mike Gritton, Maintenance Manager CBC, explains, “From the start of the project we dealt with only two vendors, both whom were very good and could provide us with a quality product. After we received initial cost of the project and looked at each vendor as to which would give us the most advantages and support, it was decided to go with Pillar. From here the biggest decision came in how we were going to fit the treater in the machine.”
Gritton goes on, “We knew from the start that room was a critical part of the project and that access for threading the coater, cleaning the treater and being able to bypass the treater when needed were key elements to a successful project. The removable magazines (on Pillar’s Universal Corona Treating System) played the biggest part of the initial decision.” “Cleaning the electrodes would have been near impossible if they were not a removable type. We (CBC) have since found that it is best to remove and have total access to electrodes to keep them clean because the location of the treater has limited access.
After we made the commitment to Pillar, we went back to Pillar with the question, ‘Can we retrofit the treater directly into our machine?’ From there, together we figured out how this could be done to both of our satisfaction.”
Frequently, applications involving existing equipment require custom designs. This was the case with CBC Coating. The application called for two-sided bare roll treatment. The customer expressed a desire to utilize an existing drive roll assembly and incorporate these components into a unitized station with the corona treatment rolls and electrodes.
To facilitate the design process, the customer employed a third party engineering firm. Using e-mail to send drawings, Pillar’s engineering staff produced a final approved layout. Under normal circumstances, Pillar would then manufacture the roll and electrodes and ship to the customer. The end user would then install the components at their facility. In this case, Scott Kessler, Corona Treater Sales Manager, decided CBC should ship the frame assembly to Pillar for final assembly and test.
Scott Maciejewski, Engineering Manager at Pillar, gave the following details. “Upon arrival of CBC’s frame assembly, we installed the treater rolls, electrodes, controls and drive bracket. This type of coordinated effort provided several advantages to CBC, the most obvious being the delivery of a factory installed and tested unit. Secondly, incorporating the drive assembly with the corona components allowed significant cost and space savings. Finally, the customer specified preferred component manufacturers for bearings, pneumatics and electrical controls. This step provides commonality of parts with the rest of the equipment in the line for future maintenance.”
According to Mr. Gritton, “Pillar and CBC worked together to custom fit the treater in their #1 pull section. The reason for this is because both the two-sided and single-sided standard treaters did not fit into the machine area and allow access to areas in the machine for operators. We came to Pillar with an idea of retrofitting their treater into our machine area. We came with a solution so that all areas of the present machine are still accessible, the treater when not in use, would not be in the way and we could easily thread when in use and not in use.”
Ms. Linda Firgens, Technical Manager at CBC, said “The treater is used to bump the surface tension back up to ensure adequate coating adhesion on rolls that have been reworked on the rewinder prior to coating. Rewinding rolls can reduce the original surface tension.” Currently, CBC is running a 10kW Pillar P6000 power supply to generate a two sided Universal Corona Treater. The system was originally purchased to ‘bump’ treat HDPE films. “The film is treated, then coated with a water-based coating on one or both sides of the web,” says Firgens.
When asked, “Why Pillar?” Gritton responded, “We liked several features of the Pillar treater including the electrode magazine design (removable, pneumatically actuated, and adjustable gap) and liked the overall design of the power supply as well.”
Combined engineering efforts have been a ‘win-win’ situation for CBC Coatings. Pillar Technologies is pleased with the results and looks forward to serving their future corona treatment needs.