Testimonials - Blown Film

Mike R. is a Production Manager for a packaging film extruder in the Mid-west. Here, he comments on the productivity improvements gained through use of SuperNova Chemical Purging Compound:

We've been using SuperNova purging compound for about six or seven years now. We have a pretty good sized blown film plant... monolayer and multilayer lines.

We have to do material changes pretty frequently. We used to have particular problems getting out of Eval or Surlyn. I guess we always left a little material behind in the system and sure enough, we'd start getting gels and specks in our production output. We'd find ourselves running three or four hours of scrap and sometimes it got bad enough that we'd lose the bubble.

Back before we used SuperNova we would either run the next resin to purge or sometimes we tried a couple of different purging products - not the chemical kind like SuperNova but the kind you just run through the system 'til it's clean. None of that kind ever got it done for us, y'know?

If we got bad contamination in the die and we couldn't clear it up running resin we'd have to tear down the die. That would take a line out of production for a day - maybe two. For a while we were doing an unscheduled teardown almost every month.

We were looking for answers for these problems when NOVACHEM called us. They focused our attention on the way that leftover production material was degrading in transitions and startups and leading to all our lost production time. They proposed that we should take one line and, after a teardown and cleaning, use their SuperNova product on every transition and shutdown, which we agreed to do.

The results really opened our eyes. That line gave us good changeovers and didn't start spitting out gels and stuff. When we started it up after a shutdown we saw little or no specking. After about two months we were convinced and we switched all the lines over to using SuperNova - and we've been using it ever since.

We figure that we've picked up 10 or 12 hours a month on the changeovers and probably three shifts a month on teardowns that we've avoided. The nice thing for me is that we hardly ever do an unplanned teardown any more.

You have to use this product as a regular maintenance tool - not as some kind of fire extinguisher. But if you do that, it'll pay off for you.