Danafilms gaining capacity with new film line

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Danafilms gaining capacity with new film line

Plastics News - July 2008

Danafilms’ new Battenfeld Gloucester blown film line will give the company more than 5 million pounds of new capacity. The line can handle rolls as wide as 78 inches and with diameters of 40 inches.

WESTBOROUGH, MASS. (July 25, 11:55 a.m. EDT) -- Danafilms Inc. has added a Battenfeld Gloucester blown film line to its Westborough plant, bringing the total number of lines there to 14.

Sales manager Steve Crimmin said in a July 18 telephone interview that the company spent $3 million equipping the 30-year-old plant with the new Battenfeld line and in upgrades to older machinery.

“We want to eliminate any downtime customers might have due to film issues,” Crimmin said in a news release.

The new line will add more than 5 million pounds of capacity and has winders that can handle rolls up to 78 inches wide and 40 inches in diameter.

“This will reduce the number of changeovers [on] long runs,” Crimmin said. “We’ve added internal bubble cooling to increase our throughput so that we can always keep up with demand, and everything is computer-controlled for quality and consistency.”

The new line includes an Autoprofile air-ring system that monitors and corrects the thickness of blown film as it exits the die, Crimmin said. It adjusts the thickness of the film by firing heated air from 96 heating components at exact locations on the surface of the bubble. The heating components interface with an Extrol microprocessor via an online thickness gauge. The air jets thin the bubble wall where required.

Other plant improvements include oscillating hauloffs on three other blown film lines to evenly distribute any gauge imperfections, thus increasing uptime for high-speed printing and conversion.

Danafilms has been manufacturing polyethylene films since 1970. Today it supplies converters with monolayer and multilayer coextruded films. Danafilms processes low and linear low density PE, metallocene-catalyzed PE and ethylene vinyl alcohol resins. It operates plants in Westborough and Franklin, Ky.

Danafilms ranked 84th among North American film and sheet producers in Plastics News’ 2007 survey, with fiscal 2006 sales of $57.8 million. The company employs 94.