Starlinger delivers 100th lamiTEC for coating and laminating

The Starlinger lamiTEC for coating and laminating of woven plastic fabric

Sacks made of woven plastic fabric are often coated or laminated to protect the content from dust or moisture; moreover, coated material has excellent printing properties. For this application, Starlinger offers the coating line lamiTEC that is suitable for extrusion coating as well as laminating. In April 2018, Starlinger delivered the 100th machine of this type to Fatima Packaging Limited in Pakistan.

Starlinger developed the lamiTEC for use on a variety of woven plastic fabrics: from flat or tubular fabric for standard woven sacks or AD*STAR block bottom valve sacks through to technical fabrics made from polypropylene (PP) or high-density polyethylene (HDPE). Fabric coating is commonly applied for practical reasons (tightness, shelf life), but visual aspects are important as well: For those who value a first-rate appearance for marketing purposes, laminating with reverse-printed BOPP (biaxially oriented polypropylene) is the preferred choice.

The lamiTEC is based on its predecessor stacoTEC 1500; during the engineering process, Starlinger focussed on achieving a modular design to account for the increasing diversity of special sacks.

"The lamiTEC is a high-speed coating and laminating machine capable of performing a fully automatic roll change," explains Senior Extrusion Engineer Michael Aigner. "Apart from being efficient, this ensures consistently high coating quality."

Laminated sacks make a particularly good impression

A special technical feature of the lamiTEC is the newly developed Starlinger edge trim refeed, which enables the customer to recycle not only common edge trims, but also a composition of fabric, coating, and BOPP film. This feature leads to a substantial reduction of the production waste that occurs throughout the laminating process.

In April 2018, Starlinger delivered the 100th lamiTEC to Fatima Packaging in Pakistan, which has been producing woven plastic sacks for fertilizer, sugar, rice, seeds, chemicals, and other products on Starlinger machinery since 2012. On the one hand, Fatima Packaging uses the sacks to package its own products; on the other hand, it supplies companies in Pakistan and Afghanistan with packaging material. The coating process on the lamiTEC MX ensures that the content of the woven bags is protected from external influences such as moisture. The machine is part of a complete AD*STAR project; this means that the installed capacity of currently around 52 million sacks per year will be increased shortly. In addition to the coating line, the scope of supply comprises a tape extrusion line with automatic winders as well as a printing line rollFLEX PX and a sack conversion line of the new generation ad*starKON HX. The conversion line is equipped with the option microSTAR+, which allows for efficient aeration of the sacks' content through finest microperforation of the coated fabric.