A great team story!
Last year our company started to produce a Vapor Barrier paper: “METIVO® VB 63gsm_rev3”. This paper is currently being tested worldwide by several customers. Since a few months our R&D team has been focused on the development of a next generation barrier paper for both Vapor and Oxygen. The laboratory work involved the evaluation of several Oxygen barrier coatings (OTR coatings).
The technical challenge was to find a coating that was able to fulfill at the same time many different requirements such as:
- Food contact safety
- Applicability via Rotogravure (a technology used at all our sites),
- High flexibility, to avoid losing the barrier after folding,
- Good cohesiveness with the rest of the paper/coating structure and
- Good adhesion to the thin metallized layer applied by vacuum deposition by our metallizers
After the laboratory work was concluded, the scale-up phase started entailing run test trials at industrial scale. Our site in Berlin was chosen for the scale-up. The R&D team in Berlin is one of the most experienced in processing such oxygen barrier coatings in their Kroenert coating machine. Despite the intense laboratory work and all preparatory video meetings, the result of the two industrial trials was disappointing. During the first trial the oxygen coating showed an uneven surface where bubbles were visible. In the second trial the team focused on setting the drying conditions to avoid the formation of bubbles, but when the bubbles disappeared, the coating showed adhesion failure.
Consequently, an inhouse task force of engineers and R&D people from Italy and Germany met in Berlin trying to solve the issues: Sven Rudolph, Stavros Katsamakas, Giorgio Locci, Valeria Rasetto, Alfredo Durando and Daniela Mondelli. The team worked very well together and challenged each other with their different backgrounds and viewpoints form engineering, chemistry and product design. In a constructive way the team members questioned themselves… and each other. The team worked together with operators from 2 shifts at the Kroenert machine and 2 shifts at the metallizer. Both teams have been of great support in running the 14 (!) different industrial trials.
Trial nr. 14 was a break-through: the paper did not show any adhesion issues nor bubbles. Technically a great success! But more than this technical achievement, the result obtained was interesting because of the great inter-cultural merge between our Italian and German colleagues, that allowed all team members to think outside the box and scientifically prove that the bubbles were not linked to the shock of the drying of the coating, but to the setting of the transfer roller.
This is only one of the challenges that our R&D team has to face to bring to market this new barrier paper, which is still under development. We will continue to follow this great team on their journey!