Brampton's AquaFrost trials fully booked

Mississagua, ON — While Brampton Engineering (Brampton, ON) occupied a booth at the recent Plast-Ex event (May1-3; Toronto International Centre, Mississagua, ON), its real display was 10 minutes up Airport Rd. at client Packall Packaging Inc. (Brampton, ON), which runs three Brampton blown-film lines, including the only downward-blown water-quenched AquaFrost system in North America. On this day, the line, which includes an annealing station with oscillating hauloff, was making a nine-layer nylon/EVOH barrier film.

Officially launched at K 2001, although the technology goes back to proprietary in-house installations in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s, Brampton has installed eight machines globally, including a 10-layer line in Finland. Due to the proximity to its headquarters and an understanding with the processor, Brampton uses the Packall line for customer trials, although opportunities to do so of late have been reduced with Packall increasingly using the line for its own clients, according to Brampton’s Peter Bicak, manager of research and development.

At one time, all of Packall’s thermoforming films were purchased—now they can make them in house using the AquaFrost, saying it creates films that thermoform more uniformly. They system allows the use of cheaper nylon 6, while maintaining 3% haze, compared to 8-10% in blown films, which also require more expensive nylons.

Bicak was a fixture at Packall in March in April, with the machine completely booked for potential customer trials. Bicak says the system cost is comparable to cast and more expensive than blown film, but with greater throughput. As it is in many advances, North America remains tentative to embrace new technologies, with Bicak using Europe’s adoption of autogauging five to six years before the U.S. as an example of reticence to try new things. Bicak does say he is seeing more interest from North American firms, which in lieu of multilayer systems for barrier, use lamination, which adds a secondary step, for packaging of items like meat and cheese.—[email protected]