The Dehli/NCR based Carbon Light, a leading manufacturer of carbon fiber components, is taking part in the K exhibition in October 2019. The company, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of North Street Cooling Towers, began the manufacture of carbon fiber products with drive shafts for its parent’s cooling towers. It has subsequently explored other markets such as printing press rollers, flexo sleeve cores and flexo sleeves.
In the past year, Carbon Light has taken part in several print and packaging exhibitions and now plans to exhibit at K to take advantage of its carbon fiber component manufacturing expertise. The company is already an exporter of drive shafts and components to leading global manufacturers. The Indian printing and packaging industry has also taken notice and some OEMs, such as Pelican, have placed initial orders for the company’s Tufflite rollers that are anti-static, highly conductive and abrasion resistant apart from being light-weight with an extremely favorable weight to strength ratio. The company’s expertise lies in being able to create a wide variety of rollers by taking into account the strength and rigidity that are required for each application.
Carbon fiber rollers are essentially a complex example of engineering calculations that dictate the quality and quantity of carbon strands that are first spun and then processed by heat and other finishing processes into end-products. Carbon Light’s pioneering has extended to the equipment and process that is needed for the manufacturing process as well.
The advantages of the use of carbon fiber rollers are huge and are increasingly being understood by the Indian manufacturers of filling and sealing machines, extrusion blown film lines, CI flexo presses, laminators and slitter-rewinders. Efficiencies have gone up with the use of Carbon Light’s Tufflite dancer rollers in filling & sealing and printing machines that improve or smoothen the tension faster on in-feeds for any substrate, since the lower self-weight of the roller does not inhibit its faster reciprocating or balancing movement. The carbon fiber Tufflite dancer rollers have already helped to improve the overall efficiency of some of the machines by about 25%.
In the case of any break or emergency in a moving substrate such as paper or film, a machine needs to be shut down immediately in order to avoid wastage. On such occasions it takes a lot of time for the machine to stop, which leads to wastage as the roller continues to wrap the substrate around itself due to its momentum. Since the light-weight carbon fiber rollers have less momentum, they are extremely efficient in slowing down and stopping, thereby curbing wastage and helping to easily track faults in such applications.
Some converters have used Carbon Light’s ability to manufacture rollers to specification for replacing the originally supplied but now worn rollers in their long ago imported laminators and printing machines. It seems that the Indian end-consumers, particularly flexible packaging converters, have been quick to realize the benefits of having a local supplier of high quality rollers and even flexo sleeves. The Indian manufacturers of packaging equipment are also catching on and several have approached the young team that runs Carbon Light for initial trials. The company is optimistic that its stand at the K exhibition in Dusseldorf may lead to further breakthroughs both globally and particularly in the Indian flexible packaging industry.
