How do we select the most effective wrinkle removal solutions?

Jeffrey Damour

Most anti-wrinkle rollers remove wrinkles. Concave rollers, grooved rollers, nip type spreader rollers, bowed rollers and expanding surface rollers all remove wrinkles. They may vary in their aggressiveness and the amount of wrinkles they take out, but they all work to some extent to help with web wrinkle problems.

So how do you select the right one? Well, the question to ask yourself (and your supplier) is what are the rollers doing to my material in the long run? Especially with new directives handed down from your customers to run thinner materials.

Thinner materials wrinkle more because they are less stable than their thicker counter parts, so when you attempt to convert thinner gauge "stuff" you may get wrinkles where you never had them before. Be careful how you select your next anti-wrinkle roll to help solve this problem.

Anti-wrinkle rollers can harm and distort your thin materials (paper, film, foils, non-wovens). Bowed rollers and concave rollers have non-linear faces, which will increase the tension profile of the web in certain areas and decrease it in other areas. This may stretch or distort your webs permanently. Grooved rollers and nip type spreaders have non smooth surfaces which may mark your web or cause different wrinkles.

So while these rollers do remove wrinkles, sometimes the most important question is - What am I doing to my materials by using these rollers? Often times these types of spreaders can cause more harm than good.

Try to find an anti-wrinkle roller with linear face and smooth surface. They aggressively remove wrinkles with zero web distortion and deformation.