Interview with David Newell, Business Development Manager at SuperCorrExpo 2024.
Please tell us about your company and your product.
This is a combined Kongsberg Cutting Systems and DigiTech booth.
What we’re showing here are two really new things for you guys. We’ve brought the new LT/X3 with DigiTech.
This is their new high-speed printer with three rows of print heads. We’re doing this double E flute corrugate job in just over a minute and a half for double-sided print.
We’ve paired this with an even faster flatbed printer, which has some really unique features, most of which are on the back end. So, let’s walk around and start looking at them.
Kongsberg Precision Cutting Systems (Kongsberg PCS) is a leading provider of robust and reliable digital cutting solutions. The company serves various markets, including packaging, signage, display, and manufacturing, offering innovative technology that enhances production efficiency and creativity.
As we’re printing here on the DigiTech printer, the key is how we integrated this printer. On the back side, as it’s done printing, we’re showing the printer automatically offloading this double-sided printed corrugate file. We did a watermark on the backside of the print and the actual print file on the front.
DigiTech is a prominent manufacturer of grand format flatbed printers, known for their high-speed, precision, and reliability. The company focuses on providing innovative digital printing solutions that enhance productivity and quality for various industries.
As we feed that off, we’re putting it onto a fully automated conveyor system where it’s staging each sheet. The key here is that the operator of the printer is also the operator of the cutter. As it stages these sheets, we get into the automation where we pick up those sheets.
We can see here that we have the print on the other side too, right?
We’re doing face-down print registration to get good creasing quality on the right side. Then we’re stacking these sheets in an accumulator. Sometimes printing isn’t always the same speed as cutting, so we’ve solved that problem by having this accumulator that can automatically stack those sheets.
If there’s a mismatch in the printing to cutting speed, we’re handling that and keeping everything moving smoothly and optimizing the process. After we come through this automation, we’re presenting it to the Kongsberg Cutting Machine.
Here, we’re debuting the new Kongsberg Ultimate, the fastest cutting system in the world. It has a ten-foot by ten-foot cutting area, moving at over 6000 inches a minute with 2.6G of acceleration.
We’re doing creasing, perforating, and cutting of this nice little sample box that people can take out. Once we’re done cutting, we feed the finished sheet forward, and the stacker picks up the sheet and puts it on the pallet. The goal is to go from unprinted material to a pallet of finished goods without ever touching the material again.
Let’s see, that’s kind of what we’re trying to do.
At the end, we can see the finished samples of what we’ve been cutting out. Double-sided, and it folds together into a nice little NASCAR sample that people can take home.
Wow. Beautiful. Do you have something about sustainability?
Yeah. One of the big pushes when we developed the Ultimate was to really go after green energy and sustainability. The new machine has 100% recycled and recyclable materials.
There are no plastics or mixed materials that are non-recyclable.
We’re really trying to push green energy with the development of all new products at Kongsberg. In addition, we do a lot of power consumption monitoring, automatically adjusting the vacuum pump flow to maximize suction without wasting power.
The biggest thing for green energy for us is the longevity of the equipment. With the printers, cutters, and automation, Kongsberg machines that are 30 years old are still running.
We like to say that our biggest effort in green is keeping the machines running well past 20 to 30 years.
Thank you, David.
Thank you so much.
Reporting from Orlando by Igor Tkalenko – corruga.expert
