Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Tools that Create

Continued from Page 5

Opening the door to still more new products, a dairy multinational in New Zealand is using the hyperbaric chamber to pasteurize vitamin-rich colostrum, the first milk mammals produce, which cannot be treated thermally. This product is being marketed in China, where it is associated with good health.

Other manufacturers of food packaging machinery have also been able to innovate and expand in recent years. Posimat, which makes machines for filling bottles, patented a system that can automatically change from one size of bottle to another. Mespack, whose machines utilize flexible packaging, developed a system to allow the machine to automatically correct for unexpected stretching in a given material.

Ulma Packaging creates a wide variety of automatic machines and packaging technologies, from thermoforming to bagging with stretch- or shrink-film machines to sealing plastic films. Working closely with customers to develop the appropriate solutions, the company has focused on researching new films and implementing advances in 3-D design workflow, robotics, and communication or electronic controls.

“We have to stay very closely connected to film manufacturers because of innovative solutions coming in films themselves,” says Francisco Etxaniz, managing director of Ulma Packaging's research center. Here, too, environmental concerns are driving innovations. As companies meet demands to recycle more and produce less waste, new biofilms are being developed that are thinner, less toxic, and biodegradable. “We've developed and patented technologies to deal with the properties of these thinner films,” says Etxaniz.

As consumer products advance and trends such as concern about environmental impact evolve, Spanish companies will continue to develop new technologies to meet these ever-changing needs.

Focus on an Innovator

About a half-hour outside of Barcelona , a small family company has developed a new material that may help the automobile industry reduce car weight and fuel consumption.

Rovalma originated as an import business in the 1970s, supplying materials such as tool steels for dies and molds. Isaac Valls, son of the company's founder, left Spain to study for his PhD in materials science at Stanford University . During his first year, in 2000, he stayed up to date on the company. “I was taking my time, taking classes in everything that interested me,” he says. “All of a sudden I detected that the industry was going to need new tool steels in three to four years.” He sped through his second year in three months and returned to Spain .

The big change that Valls observed in the industry was the introduction of advanced high-strength steels. These new alloys provide a number of benefits over traditional steel alloys. Because they are so much stronger, they allow manufacturers to use less material even as they make cars safer. The resulting weight reductions can improve gas mileage and decrease a car's impact on climate change. But their extreme strength also makes these materials difficult to shape.

The high-strength steels, Valls predicted, would rapidly wear down cutting and shaping tools. “We thought that the tool material the industry has been using for the last 40 years is not going to hold up,” he says. His predictions proved accurate: suddenly tools that had lasted for hundreds of thousands of pieces shattered after only 100.

With more enthusiasm than resources or equipment (“we only had one little optical microscope and nothing else,” he recalls), Valls started researching alternatives. Fortunately, the research center CTM had recently opened in Manresa , not far from his family's business. In addition, the Spanish government had recently increased available research funds.

Valls began investigating what caused the failures. With the help of CTM, he determined that the cracks originated in the carbides, compounds produced by heating the tool steels to achieve the required resistance. CTM provided the equipment and a researcher able to assist in nano-indentation, using a diamond tip to create the beginnings of cracks and determine the fracture toughness of different carbides.