Ton Knipscheer talked to Karsten Schröder about „Digital Heating“

A live interview recorded in Berlin in October 2022

It was a great pleasure to meet so many high-quality representatives of the international flexible packaging industry at the Inno-Meeting Europe 2022 in Berlin. Inspiring keynotes with challenging perspectives and a very nice social programme. I had the privilege to be there and to make many valuable contacts. Afterwards, I was able to talk to Karsten about how disruptive this digital heating technology is, said Ton Knipscheer after the event.

Saving material, energy and process time while using sustainable mono-materials seems so logical, but until recently this was not possible. This year, the World Packaging Organisation presented the World Packaging Award to WATTTRON for this revolutionary technology.

Listen to this interview from Berlin, conducted in English.

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Transkript

I’m here with Ton Knipscheer and he was talking about a new sealing technology. What is it all about? Particularly a technology where we refer to as digital heating. So we go back to the level of we seal on the surface on the seal surface. So if you look at the pixels here which are five by five millimeters.

This is all we heat and this is all we control so we don’t have to heat at this big lump of metal which of course leads to lots of energy losses and lots of efficiency losses, but we just heat the surface and we can control these individual pixels with individual temperature settings 100 times per second.

So this extremely accurate and what is the benefit of this technology the benefit of this technology is that if you have the new mono materials which have a very much smaller melting window the advantage there is that you can play with the temperature. Therefore if you have a layer step you can put 160 degrees. If you have a double layer you can put 230 and 140 degrees you can differentiate temperature.

Therefore you do not need to compensate this with time or pressure because now you can be controlled the temperature. We’re just current sealing markets. You cannot really okay and you use it as well for deep drawing applications. What is this? We have an application because if you have a classical thermoforming application, you will get something like this where you can see the further you’ve drawn deep the thinner it becomes it’s like we’re chewing on a mobile.

Yeah, and if you can place a heat profile in the different pixels around here, so here left for example is 150 degrees and here it’s 160 degrees. This is the same material. But then with a different temperature profile and what material is it? This is a polypropylene which we tested and here this is 500 my company coupling but here you need to increase this at least with 200 micron. So this needs to go to 700 micron and here you can actually the same 500 you can reduce it at least to 350 micron.

That means you have a gap of 50% and this 50% is not only material saving but it’s also energy saving and it process is faster. And you mentioned that button is a startup six years old. It’s still on the market. This is already on the market. We are installing this in the meat industry in Germany. For example, where a lot of meat producers have been told by their end users the retail you should really go to sustainable materials a device. We will discuss other situations continuation.

For example coming back to the sealing technology. You talked about 90% energy saving. Oh 90% of energy saving is the same. Was thermophonia talk about 50% in energy saving depends on the amount of material you saved. So basically if you go from 700 micron to 350 micron, which is 50% material, we say on average that’s 50% energy. It’s like with a steak: if you bake a thick steak, it takes longer to cook, and if you make a thin steak, okay. And concerning the sealing technology, it’s not only the energy savings.

It’s also a time matter of quality. Yes, we — one of the things that we’re measuring, which we’re developing at the moment: each individual pixel is controlled. Therefore we can tell exactly what amount of energy we need to reach that set temperature for the sealing. So for example, if this pixel here needed more energy to reach the set sealing temperature, we know that there must have been a contamination in between. So that’s a situation the system flags to the central unit.

Energieverbrauch und Kontaminationsprobleme

There has been more energy consumed in this zone. For there must be a contamination — look at this and perhaps sort it. So we digitalize the sealing technology, correct? And it’s basically industry 4.0 because it’s machine learning and, as I’ve said in the presentation as well, the fact that there is less skilled operators at production sites. I think digitalization of machines and machine learning is going to be crucial. That’s really interesting, exciting. Thanks for this short introduction. You’re welcome.

Thank you guys.