To give top international players a complete overview of opportunities and trends in the packaging field and to bring raw material suppliers, technology providers and distributors together. This, in short, was the goal ofThe Packaging Conference, held last 6 - 8 February in the prestigious setting of the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay, Florida.
Sacmi, needless to say, played a pivotal role by presenting a report on compression technology in the manufacture of coffee capsules, an industry segment with one of the highest potential growth rates in the coming years.
Thanks to a development policy based on continuous innovation - no less than €65 million was invested in R&D in 2016 alone - Sacmi has come up with the market's most competitive technology for such solutions. A technology that has the industry's lowest TCO (total cost of ownership, that is, management and running costs), ensures outstanding capsule quality and offers new opportunities (in terms of the variety of usable materials and the properties of the capsule itself). Moreover, it provides unbeatable practicality thanks to the intrinsic advantages of a technology in which Sacmi leads the world with over 1,700 systems installed internationally.
“Key projects”, presented to an event audience of over 200 top managers and production supervisors, included multilayer compression moulding. This represents the final frontier of a solution that (two years after the market launch of the first Sacmi application for manufacturing mono-material coffee capsules and after winning numerous customers, many of them leaders in the industry) allows a true "multilayer" cap to be made using compression technology: a cap with excellent strength and barrier properties (the OTR, oxygen transmission rate, is less than 0.0005 cc/capsule/day).
Multilayer compression moulding thus pushes the potential of this technology to new heights - a technology that already allows Sacmi to offer the market capsules made of various materials, from PP to PLA (compostable polymer) and PBT, a mono-material which gives capsules good barrier properties.
The technological heart of the solution remains the CCM (continuous compression moulding). This Sacmi compression press offers, compared to the alternative injection technology, intrinsic advantages such as energy savings of up to 30%, lower cycle times (a case study on Nespresso-compatible PP capsules reduced cycle times, with respect to injection, from 3.8 to 2.4 seconds) and optimised capsule weight.
Proposed for both closed (proprietary capsule) and open (compatible capsule) systems, the Sacmi solution also provides major advantages in terms of process efficiency: the ability to manage each cavity independently, a feature unique to this technology, makes maintenance easier and boosts process efficiency. Lastly, the process allows real-time quality control of each capsule thanks to integration with Sacmi-developed vision systems. The outcome: maximum, long-lasting repeatability in terms of capsule “opening performance” and a guaranteed seal.
