Oerlikon airlaid advance

Germany’s Oerlikon Neumag is introduced a new airlaid forming head at the forthcoming IDEA13 show in Miami, which it says ensures consistent quality even when processing the extremely low weight materials that are being employed today.

The patented design of the core of the airlaid system guarantees very even laying of the fibres due specially-guided air flows. This prevents the unwanted and wasteful thin areas within low weight airlaids that previously was only possible when operating at significantly reduced process speeds. The new formation enables the production of low weight airlaid materials while fully exploiting the system’s capacity – and with a simultaneous reduction of raw materials.

This means, for example, that challenging combination materials, often comprising airlaids and spunbonds, can be manufactured at production speeds of up to 500 metres per minute – more than twice as fast as comparable standard market systems.

In spunbonding, meanwhile, Oerlikon believes there is a huge opportunity for polyester spunbonds, since they are more cost-efficient than polypropylene and particularly suitable for geotextile and roofing solutions. In addition to the classical major markets in North America and Europe, promising growth is expected in emerging industrial regions for general construction and civil engineering measures. Oerlikon Neumag’s spunbond systems for industrial applications are compact in size and excel in terms of their production capacities of 300 kg per hour per metre of operating width.