Case Studies | Fluoron

WestRock Corrugated Packaging And A Caking Problem

For a little context – WestRock company is a leading provider of corrugated packaging solutions in a number of industries, with a truly global presence. WestRock’s packaging solutions include corrugated boxes, folding cartons, displays, and packaging machinery.

Fluoron’s Happy Customers At WestRock

Sean Dalson, a veteran Production Supervisor at Westrock in the sunny state of Florida is responsible for many things, including keeping the lights on and the lines running. A few years back Sean and his team were faced with caking issues on a printing line for high end outer-liners of corrugated boxes. Evidently hot ink can be quite tacky and will gum up the rollers enough to shut down operations every few days. If you are reading this publication you already know how expensive a shut down production line can be, and you can imagine how frustrated Sean and his team were each and every time they had to clean those rollers.

The Stakes Are High For Line Shutdowns

Sean estimates that these issues were costing his operation about $25,000 over a year period. These sorts of problems can persist where there is no alternative, however in Sean’s case the team was ready to experiment and fix the problem. What do you do when your rollers are sticky and covered in buildup? If you are like me, you first try the cheapest thing around, some traction tape for a few hundred dollars. Then a month later when you are scraping caked ink AND traction tape off your equipment you do what Sean did, and call Fluoron for a non-stick heat shrink sleeve.

What Almost Worked

Hopefully we can save you some time and effort by sharing Westrock’s experience with a potential solution. Traction tape, like what you might find from a large adhesive company, can be an improvement in cases like this, where caking and buildup are shutting down expensive production lines. However this method has a clear downside as our customers at Westrock learned.

Here are Production Supervisor Sean’s own words on the topic:

“We spoke to Chris, trialed Fluoron’s heat shrink sleeve, and two months later our problem was entirely solved. The traction tape was a fair stopgap, but required purchase and reapplication every month. We have had the Fluoron sleeve for a year and a half with zero issues.”

So yeah, at the end of the day you are still taking man-hours to clean off equipment when a robust and mature technology already exists to solve the buildup problem. Fluoropolymers of course are the answer.

Coatings For Rollers to Prevent Caking Issues