It's among the most important annual conclaves for the coating/laminating technical community, and the fact that it's usually held in a swanky location doesn't hurt. This year's AIMCAL (Association of Industrial Metallizers, Coaters and Laminators) Fall Technical Conference was held in October at the Marriott Resort at Grand Dunes, Myrtle Beach, SC. All that technical experience and knowledge in one place provided Converting with an opportunity to pose questions to six of AIMCAL's technical consultants about the current status and future prospects of their industry. Since the full conversation lasted more than an hour, it's abbreviated here, and the full text of the discussion can be viewed at www.convertingmagazine.com.

Panel participants included Charles Bishop (CA Bishop ConsultingLtd., CABishopConsulting@cabuk1.co.uk); Edward D. Cohen (Edward D. Cohen Consulting, EdCohen@aimcal.org); Larry Gogolin (Gogolin & Associates, Lgogolin@aol.com); John Fenn (Fennagain, johnfenn@aimcalblog.org) Eldridge Mount (EMMOUNT Technologies, LLC, emmount@earthlink.net); and Tim Walker (TJ Walker + Associates, tjwalker@tjwa.com).

Converting: It's said that there has not been any significant new web-coating technology in the last few years. Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree, which web-coating technology do you feel has had the greatest impact?

Mount: I disagree. Certainly there have been more than incremental improvements in vaccuum web-coating technology, as well as enhancements elsewhere. In my practice I see it in the materials as well as in the material processes. Multilayer coatings, pretreatments, and substrates all impact the different coating processes, even though similar in nature or intent to the existing, allowing new wrinkles. Multilayer barrier coatings allow a much wider range of materials to be made and processed than what was considered possible before.

Cohen: I disagree. While coating has been around for four or five hundred years, the timeframe is about 10–15 years between significant developments. In that time period there has been a major advance in the fundamental understanding of fluid flow in the coating process, which has led to the ability to design custom applicators to meet a variety of needs, with the result now that we are able to do coating with uniform application along the order of 1 to 2 percent. The coating process can now be run at 5000 feet per minute with good quality.

Gogolin: I'd have to say that I agree with the statement. The difference is what you define as "the last few years." I think what Ed is talking about all came about 10 years ago or more. But as I go to the trade shows and read the journals, I'm not all that impressed with what's occurred in, say, the last five years. It's "more of the same," although there are incremental improvements. I'd like to see things moving along a lot faster.

Fenn: I disagree with the statement. I think there are a lot of new emerging technologies that people are not ready to talk about yet. As a consultant you're in a position to know about things that are being developed that are not yet "public." There's a lot of controversy over what's considered IP [intellectual property] vs. trade secrets. The opportunities I see are in areas such as flexible displays, photovoltaics, printed electronics and RFID tags. I think those are going to be explosive in the next 10 years. The use of nanotechnology will also help revolutionize the coating industry, but once again it will take time. I always tell my people, "wait until they can produce 55-gallon drums of this material vs. pints." You cannot start up a coating line with pints of materials.

Walker: Technology new to the market may not be new to the world. There are some quite interesting coating methods that are held as corporate secrets for many years, but are eventually revealed for more widespread use. Is this new? This is similar to defense industry technology where what could be considered old technology, the stealth bomber construction, is now "new" as it is applied to commercial applications. Is this new technology? No, but a new application or wider use of old technology is something new.

Bishop: It depends on the timeframe. I think in terms of vacuum coating and the technology available, the process of depositing and curing in vacuum of polymer layers, either under or over regular vacuum-deposited coatings, is based on patents where the underlying technology is 15 years old. It has taken that long to get into the marketplace. And generally that's been cost-related. The inventors put such an added value for them, that it's inhibited the adoption by industry.

Converting: In your careers as technical consultants what problems do you see most often and which are most challenging?

Mount: Well, the problems that I see most often are related to product failures, and characterization of how they were made, and how they were supposed to function. A lot of times what I see is the uncertainty about the quality and how you interpret analytical results to determine the source of the failure so you can engineer the process and the product.

Cohen: What I have found is a lack of technology. Web coating is universal, a lot of companies do it that don't have the technology to make money, improve the process and develop new products. I come in and help develop the technology. Everybody knows that developing a web coating in the lab is the easy part, it's the actual scaling up of a product and process that really makes money and does what you want that is challenging. I find it a challenge to go into some of these companies and tell them about technology that they never knew existed.

Gogolin: I spend a lot of time on the plant floor with the operations group, standing next to the coater, and the two challenges I run into are: the quality as it pertains to yields—a mature coating process should be able to get close to 99 percent, and many of the people I work with are in the 70 percent range, which is kind of ridiculous. The other is changeover time. As companies move more and more into Just-in-Time, they're having to do many more equipment changeovers such as switching from paper to plastic or changing coating fluids, which is causing major losses in uptime.

Fenn: I'm going to sound like a broken record. The two major problems in specialty roll coating are getting adequate incoming substrates from film suppliers, and keeping the substrates clean during subsequent processing. The issue is that existing volumes for specialty films are not large enough for film manufacturers to make the necessary changes in their processes. You cannot improve the quality of the film surface by handling it more. The industry is changing this paradigm, however. If we can improve the substrate quality during handling, we can overcome some of these defects. But we just don't buy enough film to get that to change.

Walker: The most common problems I work on involve handling challenging materials. Web handling waste goes up as companies move from thick films to thin films or change substrates from paper to film. The challenge of moving from heavy-tension to light-tension, avoiding scratches and wrinkles—the whole issue of proper tension control as dictated by your product and process. Another source of phone calls is people doing discrete coating of patterns and meeting tight registration specs. Many markets are opened up as roll-to-roll processes improve their registration techniques. Rounding out the list are baggy webs, winding or wound-roll defects.

Bishop: In the vacuum coating area, the biggest problem that I run across repeatedly is coating defects. The bulk of those relate back to the substrate material. Either customers don't understand how the substrate is being produced, or the treatments have not been effective. They assume that every supplier is supplying the same grade of material, and it is not that way. The biggest challenge is working remotely. My customers don't necessarily want me to travel there to solve the problem on their site, but they want me to do it remotely, via phone or e-mail. Finding a common language, understanding whether the problem they're describing is actually the one you're trying to solve—then to get to the root cause and solve the problem—that's the challenge.

Converting: What process/chemical improvement(s) represent the greatest business opportunity for web-coating companies?

Walker: If you gave me ten million dollars to invest in the converting industry, what would I do with it? After hearing about the many options for drying, curing, and laminating, I think you would be popular and profitable with a multi-functional pilot line to evaluate these technologies and test them out. I'd also need a slitter/rewinder to cut webs down to sample-size rolls.

Fenn: I think what is needed is polymer substrates with higher process temperature properties and improved vapor-barrier properties that are environmentally friendly, as well as lower resistance transparent conductive films and non-indium based TCOs. The work being done on conductive polymers and nanoparticle doped polymeric systems is also very promising.

Gogolin: A lot of the coating lines I see are dedicated to certain application techniques and certain products, and when these change they really cannot be utilized, so there's a lot of unutilized coating time. One of the interim ways companies can spend a little money and get a big return is by buying one of these cartridge coaters.

Cohen: I think there's a significant opportunity in low-volume, high-value products—a way to make them efficiently and cheaply. I also agree with Larry [Gogolin] that we're at an age where one coating method won't work for all products, and the cartridge-coating concept could be part of that.

Mount: One of the best things coaters can use to improve their process, productivity and flexibility is to chemically modify the surface of the substrate. It will have a dramatic effect on properties. Either putting down the polymer in situ, or prior to a deposition process or between coatings, the surface treatment or chemical modification processes of one kind or another effectively increase the number of substrates.

Editor's note: the complete text of the discussion, including two additional questions, is available online at www.convertingmagazine.com.