Mladen Starcevic, the founder and general manager of Stax Technologies, explains why he believes the company’s ULTIMA product is breaking new ground. A TWM report.
Technical packaging innovations during the past 50 years have witnessed several big improvements in tissue packaging machine design. This has been crucial in assisting us in researching and developing our latest offerings for the global tissue market.
For the last 30 years, the industry has experienced mechanical line shafts, complex designs, expensive maintenance, and generally very limited machines that waste a lot of energy.
Throughout the 2000s, further developments were made with the first electronic line shafts, increased speeds, reduced maintenance and energy consumption up until today when we have a completely new generation of motion control.
ITrak – the Intelligent track system developed by Rockwell Automation – was a big step forward for the market, and was first applied in the tissue packaging industry by Stax Technologies. It eliminated belts, gears, rotary driven chains and similar mechanical constrains, replacing them with multiple independently controlled and magnetically propelled movers with adjustable software profiles, thus enabling flexibility in machine building.
I am a firm believer that every challenge is an opportunity, and as our company grows rapidly in our native Serbia, we have also diversified and are growing in the American market. Most recently we have responded to customer demand with the launch of ULTIMA, a breakthrough roll wrapper which had its North American premiere at Tissue World Miami 2018 in March.
This machine fully applies all benefits and ideas of ITrak; with simple, open and very accessible design and relatively small footprint, it offers easy and moneysaving maintenance. It also takes the idea of pitchless motion, which is present in every segment of the machine thus reducing vibrations and disturbances, delivering higher production capabilities using lower constant speeds and increasing energy savings.
Automatic control, completely tool-less changeover process and great flexibility creates an opportunity for smaller but very profitable production runs.
With speeds of 210+ packs per minute (conventional four pack) and very high quality of packed product at full speed range, this is the fastest roll wrapping machine currently on the market.
Compared to conventional packaging machines, energy usage has been reduced by 40%. The machine is capable of wrapping numerous formats of both bathroom rolls and kitchen towels, from 90mm to 200mm diameter. ULTIMA is a machine that sets new standards in the roll wrapping industry.
This article was written for TWM’s Packaging Technical Theme by Mladen Starcevic, Stax Technologies founder and general manager.
