There are many types of surface treating options—corona, flame and plasma—for converters looking to enhance the adhesion and printability of their substrates. Converting spoke with three converters using surface-treating equipment for a range of applications from coating to treating skin-packaging and masking films.

For Crayex Corp. (Piqua, OH), surface treating wasn't always so easy. Before switching to bare-roll corona treaters from Enercon Industries Corp. (www.enercondind.com), Crayex personnel had to climb 40-ft-high blown-film towers to replace covered treater rolls that burned out frequently. "With the bare-roll, recovering is not an issue, and it's up there to stay," says Don Trumbull, Crayex plant manager.

The bare-roll treater station, while eliminating downtime due to burn out of roll coverings, can also treat any substrate including plastic, foil, metallized film or paper. "As the need or desire to differentiate product from competitors grows, so grows the need to properly treat materials that can be printed or labeled," explains Rick Bornhorst, vice president of sales at Crayex. Besides the ease of maintenance, the bare-roll stations have helped increase Crayex's flexibility and its capability to provide clients with value-added, custom jobs.

The company provides film used for spa covers as well as bag film for construction products. It also supplies custom films for high-speed packaging applications, poly banner film for the advertising market, skin-packaging and masking films.

"Having (Enercon) treaters on every line in our Piqua plant has truly increased our versatility," Trumbull says. "We may run treated jobs that last eight hours and may not run another treated job for days." However, having the treaters available always gives Crayex the ability to fulfill customers' needs and run treated jobs when required.

Crayex installed its first Enercon corona treater, a 110-in. station, back in 1986. Twenty years later, it has installed nine more stations in the Piqua plant and upgraded five treaters with Compak® 2000 power supplies.

Since 1998, mono- and co-extruded films producer Charter Films (Superior, WI) continues to grow with the help of supplier partner Pillar Technologies (www.pillartech.com). "When we started our company, we needed treating equipment that would provide us with a lot of flexibility and reliability," explains Chris Trapp, chief operating officer. "We needed a treater that could provide uniform treat at a wide range of dyne levels on many different types of polyethylene films."

That need was met with Pillar's Universal corona treater systems. Charter installed two Universal systems to go with its 103-in. mono-layer and 83-in. three-layer Varex® blown-film lines from Windmoeller & Hoelscher Corp. (www.whcorp.com). Since then, the filmmaker has installed 13 more Universal systems, most recently an 88-in. corona treater with a single 15 kW P6000 power supply in May 2005.

"We utilize our treating stations on a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation," Trapp says. "The quality of our corona treatment is very important to all our printing and laminating customers. It was our feeling that Pillar would give us the most flexible and reliable treaters needed to handle our wide product mix."

Charter specializes in blown-film extrusion, producing materials for various markets and applications such as converter-grade printing and laminating, sealant, banner, and tag and label films. The treaters' magazine design enables each material to thermally expand at its own rate without causing electrode warping or changes in gap for even treatment across the web. Also, the P6000 power supply has a turndown ratio of 20:1, giving operators the ability to power up or down to achieve the desired treat level.

In November 2005, UPM's Raflatac installed a new coating line at its pressure-sensitive labelstock production facility in Fletcher, NC. The new coater focuses on quality thin films and hot-melt adhesive labelstocks for the North American market.

"Raflatac is currently implementing a strong global expansion strategy with major investment projects in North America, Europe and Asia," says Heikki Pikkarainen, president of UPM Labelstock Business. "This technology investment, coupled with the recent establishment of UPM Rafsec's new RFID-tag production facility in Fletcher, demonstrates our commitment to creating best-in-class production for the North American labelstock market."

To help meet that commitment, the company recently purchased a Vetaphone Corona-Plus treater (www.vetaphone.com) to complement its new coating line. Technical personnel from Vetaphone and Raflatac collaborated on a unique corona treater specifically for Raflatac's operation. The result: a high-speed treater for wide webs that can handle the usual type of paper and foils, plus special substrates such as metallized bi-axially oriented polypropylene film and metallized foils. It has production speeds up to about 6,560 fpm and is fitted with the Quick Change system for easy film thread-up and maintenance.