At
Mannington Mills manufacturing vinyl flooring is an art as well as science, but at the Salem, New Jersey plant, it's the science for Nick Zerebecki.
Zerebecki is Senior Scientist whose main focus is new product development and process and product improvements. He's been in the flooring industry for almost 30 years with 13 of those years at Mannington Mills, a leading flooring company that offers carpet, residential and commercial resilient sheet, vinyl tile, wood and laminate products.
Two and half years ago, as part of his process and product improvement duties, Zerebecki installed a new, Raytek ES100 automated temperature monitoring system on the three foot wide continuous web production line, one of the many production lines in the plant on which he's done development work.
As a scientist, Zerebecki can tell you that temperature is a critical element in producing quality vinyl flooring.
"For certain critical operations, you want the plastic material to be heated up to a certain temperature and marry to the cold steel roll," he said. "If it's too hot it will burn or you'll get too much embossing texture; if it's too cold you don't get proper embossing texture."
According to Mannington's product literature, pattern, color, texture and gloss combine to determine a floor's visual appeal. The company features several patented processes that combine an embossing technology and high and differential gloss, pearlescent undercoating and specialty inks. These processes create flooring with the look of natural materials such as ceramic, stone, wood, marble, granite aged stone, chiseled tile and rustic grout, as well as luminous stone, glass and metallic tiles.
"If there was a hot spot or a cold spot on a sheet, we wouldn't be aware until it was too late," he said. "We wanted to monitor temperature in real time."
Built around the MP50 process imager, the ES100 system provides an advanced ability to monitor temperature distributions across moving webs by transmitting high-resolution temperature profile data directly to a PC. Raytek DataTemp ES100 software translates the temperature data into a two-dimensional thermal image displayed on a monitor for instant operator access. Historical snapshots can be saved and compared to present results. The ES100 system can define and configure any number of measurement sectors across the web process. These sectors can be reviewed to see if the heat corresponds to the process heater zones for manual or automatic heat input adjustments.
In addition, the simple-to-use software allows the user to create custom system configurations for each type of product, and the specific product configurations, data files, and thermal images can be easily stored and recalled. In the event of an alarm, the associated thermal image can be automatically saved indicating the date, time, alarm duration, and the defect position. To monitor even more detail on a continuous process, multiple MP50 process imagers can be added.
As part of the Mannington Mills' ES100 system, there are two screens--one showing temperature, and one color-coded with red for hot, and blue for cold--so the full production line can be seen while it's running.
"If it's getting hotter or colder, you can check to see what's going on," Zerebecki said. "Before, we'd be waiting for an hourly, or quarterly temperature check."
Monitoring has improved dramatically because adjustments to something unusual happening can be made. With the ES100 system, Mannington has further improved quality, increased its process capability and created less rework. There can also be significant savings by reducing scrap levels that can be created if the heat becomes excessive or unevenly balanced.
"By improving yields as a result of improved heat consistency across the full width of the sheet, the saving in lost material and improved efficiencies is expected to be more than $ 100,000 per year," according to Mannington's commercial process engineer on the six-foot commercial line.
In addition, this cost saving estimate does not take into account easier and faster line start up and the elimination of other defects that can occur due to irregular heating. Based on the positive results documented by the ES100 system, a third system has been ordered with plans for a fourth in the works.
"I'm pretty excited," Zerebecki said. "I have something visual to show to someone else about what's happening. You can see hot and cold spots and how big an area is; it's a slick system."
Noted by Kate McGuire, Raytek Corporation.