Also this year, VETRON TYPICAL has proven to be the innovation leader in the industry. With the automated application of cold adhesive tape, VETRON TYPICAL won this year's TEXPROCESS Innovations Award in the "New Technology" category.
VETRON
AUTOMATED APPLICATION OF COLD ADHESIVE TAPE
Sealing a seam by means of adhesive tape on the reverse side is state of the art in various industries. Over the last few years, the design requirements for decorative seams in car interiors have become increasingly complex. An increasing trend of decorative seams to enhance the value of products is clearly visible. Sewn components must be sealed with a sealing tape on the reverse side in the production process after sewing to prevent penetration of the PU foam material in the subsequent process.
Tapes are usually used here that have an adhesive film that is activated by high temperatures. These are applied by means of wellknown hotmelt gluing machines, usually manually.
However, this process has considerable disadvantages:
Due to the heat generated, material changes or damage can occur on the visible side of the component. However, since the adhesives require considerable heat for activation - they must later withstand high temperatures in the vehicle - it is difficult to set the machine correctly and the series production process is unstable and prone to errors.
The high energy consumption of the application equipment is also a significant disadvantage for the user‘s sustainability considerations and will become more important in the future.
For these reasons, the use of socalled cold adhesive tapes is becoming increasingly widespread.
Here, the adhesive film is applied by the manufacturer to a carrier tape, which has to be removed again during the application process, rolled up and then fed into the recycling process. The adhesive film itself is highly elastic and the refore cannot be handled without a carrier tape.
This results in the disadvantage with all application systems available on the market today that the adhesive film cannot be cut off automatically, but must be removed by the operator at the end of the process using scissors. Consequently, automated application is out of the question.
This is in contrast to constantly increasing demands for process automation and has motivated Vetron to develop an application device that can perform the cutting and handling of the cold adhesive tape fully automatically.
VETRON INNOVATION
VETRON has succeeded in developing an application device that can apply a cold adhesive tape in an automated process via robot and automatically separate it with a tape cutter.
By means of an innovative and unique tape manager on the applied printing roll, the beginning of the tape is fixed after cutting and thus automatically stored for the next application process.
The automation guarantees a process-reliable process as well as time savings and avoids possible sources of error due to manual processing. In addition, it conserves resources by saving belt overlengths at the beginning and end of the process.