At this year’s K show in Düsseldorf, Germany, the booth of extrusion expert Battenfeld-Cincinnati will reflect the main topics of the show’s major themes: circular economy, digitalization and climate protection, with a focus on the latter, said CEO Gerold Schley.
The company will present a number of new products in that area, from drip irrigation to water management systems.
“For us, climate protection is directly connected to water management, and agriculture is a heavy user of water because of the irrigation systems used. Many of these systems are dependent on lagoons, causing problems such as clogging and hard-to-detect dripper and water outlet positions,” he explained.
The company has developed a new and simple hybrid dripper, which visitors to the booth will see in a video presentation of the new test line at the company's technical laboratory in Bad Oeynhausen. Developed by Battenfeld-Cincinnati and a partner company, the drippers are injected through the tube mold and directly welded onto the pipe while it is still hot. The simple design of the dripper ensures a uniform and continuous distribution of water. Instead of punching holes for the water outlets, these are cut, ruling out punching failures. The dripper design and high-velocity water flow ensures that clogging does not occur.
At the other extreme, the company is also presenting its new line for the production of large-diameter water pipes of up to 2,700 millimeters in diameter. The new 4-meter long segments of the downstream unit offer an alternative to previous oversized equipment and related transport problems. For the first time, the brand presents vacuum tanks and spray baths in segments of just 4 meters in length. These individual aggregates can be easily transported and are easy to assemble at the production site.
Sustainability is also the focus regarding an application for synthetic flooring. While PVC was formerly the main material used for this product, today the preference for polypropylene is often picked. The multilayer product can also feature a core layer of highly filled recyclate. Flooring producer Classen recently purchased an extrusion line with a Battenfeld-Cincinnati Multi-Touch roll stack for this application.
The melt film is fed into the 2.6-meter-wide Multi-Touch roll stack, where pre-calibration takes place, before the board passes through several more rolls for recalibration. In this way, the surface of the board is continuously in contact with the roll surfaces over a considerable period of time, with the result of perfect dimensional stability and excellent visual attributes. The haul-off is followed by a cutter. The complete line is controlled by BCtouch UX, which is integrated in the customer’s PDA system.
In the circular economy space, Battenfeld-Cincinnati will be showing a high-speed extruders for waste-to oil applications. The granulate is melted by the extruder and degassed via vacuum zones. In this way, volatile foreign substances are extracted and pumped off separately. Battenfeld-Cincinnati specially developed a new processing unit and screw geometry for this application.
As well, the company’s recycling solutions will be on display. Its STARextruders, used for producing PET sheets from new or recycled materials has long been a best-seller in this area. In response to the rising demand for recycled material, these will be joined by two new machines for this application for the processing, among others, of recycled PVC window frames: the conventionally designed twin-screw AglomEX and the AglomEX EMS, a counter-rotating twin-screw extruder with electrically driven shear-gap adjustment (EMS). Through the longitudinal movement of the barrel by an electric motor, the shear gap can be steplessly adjusted.
In addition, Battenfeld-Cincinnati is rolling out a new, uniform design across all its extruder models, which, said Schley, will be unveiled at K.
“The company offers equipment for the manufacture of virtually all types of semi-finished extruded products, from pipes, tubes, profiles, plates, to films and sheets. Because they are all manufactured at a single source, they are perfectly geared technically to work together without any interface problem and integrated into the intuitive BCtouch UX control system,” he explained. The new design offers greater functionality, with better accessibility and ease of use, including easy cleaning features, and significantly lower energy consumption through the further optimization of each separate component. “Now, with the new design, they will also be visually immediately identifiable as part of the BC family.”
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