Slitter energy efficiency

Slitter energy efficiency continues to be at the forefront of our minds here at Universal, and is increasingly popping up in converting industry news sources.
We’d like to encourage you to go and read ‘Reducing energy consumption and costs with a Slitter Rewinder’ on our company website, but in the meantime here’s a quick ‘energy reduction top five’ to whet your appetite:

1. Using electric drives instead of hydraulics
   We use electric drives instead of hydraulics on our converting machinery - hydraulics can be ‘on’ constantly, whereas electric motors only consume energy when they are actually doing something.
2. Regenerative brake energy
   Whenever possible we design our winding and slitting machines to use a motor to brake the material. The motor acts as a generator supplying energy generated by the unwind section to power the rewind section.
3. Accurate slitter setup to reduce wastage
   Using automatic knife setting, laser core alignment and web-guiding systems (among many others) our cutting machines minimise the amount of waste material created by inaccurate setting.
4. High efficiency AC motors
   The efficiency of AC motors is continually being improved. To benefit from this we use high efficiency AC motors in our machines and control systems.
5. Building machinery to recycle waste
   Our salvage winders (also known as doctor rewinders) are designed to reprocess material or ‘bad rolls’ that would otherwise be discarded as waste.  Put simply our salvage winders turn waste material into usable, saleable rolls.  We also integrate inspection systems into our salvage winders to ensure that only un-usable material is discarded.

Find out more about slitter energy savings...