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New controls give aging extrusion lamination line new life

As customer requirements surpassed the capabilities of this aging behemoth, flexible packaging producer Amgraph breathed new life into it with new drives and controls.

The extrusion laminator operates more efficiently than ever.
The extrusion laminator operates more efficiently than ever.

At 30 years old and approximately 75-feet long, the Black-Clawson two-station Extrusion Laminator dominates Amgraph’s Versaille, CT production floor. To say that it was no longer on top of its game would be putting it mildly. But management decided to prepare their outdated equipment for the needs of tomorrow by upgrading the analog control system to high-efficiency Siemens motors, Sinamics S120 digital drives, and newer control systems. As a result of the retrofit, Amgraph

  • can now use the 30-year-old system to produce a wider variety of coated plastic and foil flexible food packages
  • has cut material expenditures, and
  • has improved throughput while boosting productivity.

Andrew Alaya, vice president of engineering at Siemens Solutions Partner Circonix, knew that by upgrading the machine’s analog drives and discrete controls to the latest Siemens motors and Sinamics S120 digital drives, Amgraph could accommodate new materials, manufacture packages with thicker coatings, achieve uptime of 95 percent or better, and increase throughput by 20 percent or more. “Initially, the machine had four different motors with analog drives and controls, each with their own wiring harness and relay logic, which really made the machines a challenge to maintain,” says Alaya. “Only one of the sections was capable of tension control, which forced Amgraph to operate the extrusion machine in draw mode. This meant that the machine could only handle certain types of coatings without breaking the web and going down. Improving that uptime through better tension control was the main goal of the project.”


Circonix engineers decided to retrofit the extruder’s four existing analog drives with Siemens motors and Sinamics S120 drives, while adding four load cells inline plus a new Fulton Machinery dancer to the machine’s two unwind spindles. Also, two Vetaphone surface treaters were added inline as part of the retrofit. These effectively eliminated the need for the primer coater and served as pull stations for the machine, which were driven by Siemens motors and drives. These modifications allowed the machine to work in closed-loop tension control mode. A change in the values on the HMI and PLC enabled Amgraph production manager David Rand to precisely control the speed and thickness of the web, turn various systems such as treaters, laminators, and tension control systems on or off, and apply either thinner coatings to package materials without worrying about additional web breaks and downtime, or thicker coatings to meet special customer needs.

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