HERMA Self-adhesive Materials: Five million euro investment for specialty materials
• A high-precision rotating bar nozzle ensures minimal adhesive tolerances and a mirror-smooth coating result, even for heavier materials.
• A new cutting machine was specially designed for a wide range of material constructions, thicker label stock, and slim tapes.
Self-adhesive materials specialist HERMA has invested around five million euros in production facilities and processes for specialty materials. “From now on, we can coat special adhesive materials with extremely low tolerances, reach great stability at higher adhesive weights, and ensure excellent reproducibility even over the course of years”, explains HERMA managing director Dr. Thomas Baumgärtner. Furthermore, these investments which currently include a new coating facility and a newly installed cutting machine, now also enable a wide range of label stock constructions even for specialties such as double-sided adhesive materials. “For printers, special labels are a very lucrative business – for instance when clear-on-clear label stock must be especially heat-resistant, e.g. for electrical appliances”, says Baumgärtner. “The printer must be able to fully rely on the self-adhesive material. With regard to that, HERMA offers a comprehensive promise of quality.”
Minimal tolerances
In order to optimize the production of specialty materials, HERMA has equipped an existing coating plant for UV acrylate adhesive with an additional rotating bar nozzle that allows for very precise dosing. “During adhesive application with 20 g/m2, we thereby reach tolerances of ±1 g/m2. That is a phenomenal number”, says Dr. Uli Nägele, HERMA’s head of development. Especially for specialty materials, low tolerances are a key factor for ensuring the safe functioning of the label later on. Even when applying adhesives with 40 g/m2, HERMA’s tolerances do not exceed ±2 g/m2. “This enables us to cover a whole new range of applications requiring heavy adhesives, such as labels that must stick to rugged or difficult surfaces like plastic barrels or tyres”, says Nägele. In addition, the rotating bar nozzle ensures a crystal-clear, mirror-smooth coating result, which in turn allows for high-quality printing on the adhesive.
Faster delivery times
In order to optimally utilize the new possibilities opening up for specialty materials, HERMA also invested in a new cutting machine. “It has been designed to make all advantages available to us during this production step, e.g. regarding thicker label stock, more varied label stock constructions, and first and foremost very fast and precise cutting even of materials that are self-wound”, says managing director Dr. Baumgärtner. The cutting process is demanding, especially for the often very delicate specialty materials. “It was important to us not to invest in individual machines. The goal was to optimize the whole process, which means that the specialty products not only offer more possibilities, but also can be delivered within a shorter time.” With that in mind, HERMA had already invested millions into a new UV drying plant last summer, and installed a complex software system that ensures full traceability of production parameters.