PFFC - December 2008 - (Page 38) TENSION CONTROL Photo of tension transducers courtesy of Dover Flexo Electronics, Rochester, NH PRODUCTS Wrinkle Removers Nobody hates wrinkles more than celebrities, except for converters. Lucky for us, tension control innovations provide solutions for baggy webs. By Edward Boyle, Contributing Editor TENSION CONTROL See page 40 F or most printers and converters, tension controls are like the utilities coming into your home or office—the only time you give them any thought is when they’re not working. Yet, controlling tension is perhaps the most critical factor in attaining faster production speeds and delivering a higher quality end product. “What makes tension controls so important is that they remove any type of deviation from the [production] process so you can better control the output,” says Mark Breen, marketing manager for Dover Flexo Electronics. “It’s all about getting better output off the end of your machine at the end of the run. “The faster you’re running, the more important it is to control tension in each of your zones to maintain quality,” he says. “It’s all about quality output, and you start adding a lot of variation to the process when you’re running at higher speeds. There are all kinds of things that can happen to a web, so having tension controls at more points throughout the process makes sense to help maintain quality.” Conversely, if the tension is not properly controlled, wrinkles in the material can occur and cause product defects. If the roll of material is improperly rewound, the outer layers can crush the inner layers of material or the rolls can telescope, resulting in damage when the rolls are handled. When printing, improper tension control results in smearing of the ink and distorted images due to poor registration. “Good tension control also results in the ability to run the process at higher speeds without sacrificing product quality,” explains Don Strenio, product manager/web tension WWW.PFFC-ONLINE.COM 38 | DECEMBER 2008 http://WWW.PFFC-ONLINE.COM
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