Agami makes song and dance about Roll N Blow

French firm Agami is promoting a "world exclusive", its Roll N Blow tubular thermoforming process. The technology uses extruded plastic sheet cut into strips that are rolled around a vertical pipe to form tubular lengths that are then welded longitudinally. Bottles are formed by heating the tubes and blowing them into a mould at pressure below 6 bar and temperature below 150ºC.

Agami says its process is suitable for single or multilayer bottles in plastics such as polystyrene, polypropylene, PLA and PET.

A four-track machine, shown at Interpack, offers production speeds of up to 7,000 bottles per hour, but equipment can be designed for speeds of 5,000 to 20,000 bottles/h.

The 100 to 500ml Roll N Blow bottles can be used for water, desserts, fruit juice and fresh dairy product contents. Yoghurt bottles offer particularly high potential. There are hygiene control benefits due to the small footprint of the Roll N Blow process equipment and its thermoforming temperature of 150ºC.

This process offers cost savings of between 30 and 50% for 100ml bottles compared with conventional extrusion blow moulding and preform-based injection stretch blow moulding.

The lower weight also results in reduced material cost, and transport, storage and handling logistics costs are reduced. Agami says one truckload of plastic sheet reels for the Roll N Blow process is equivalent to 25 trucks needed to supply empty bottles or five trucks to supply preforms. The company adds that electricity consumption is two to three times lower than with preform-based injection stretch blow moulding.

Having worked previously at packaging producer Tetra Pak and form-fill-seal line producer Arcil, Agami's CEO Stylianos Eleftheriou started the Roll N Blow project in 2007.

The equipment uses Rockwell Automation components for motion and automation. Six-axis motion is used to cut, form and create the bottles. Allen-Bradley servomotors are coupled with Kinetix servo drives and controlled by a CompactLogix PAC (programmable automation controller). Operator interaction and machine control takes place via an Allen-Bradley PanelView Plus 1250 HMI control panel.