Roll-2-Roll Technologies was awarded the 2016 AIMCAL Technical Excellence Award at the 2016 Management Meeting held in Carlsbad, CA, USA, on March 20th, 2016. This award in the “Coating, Laminating, and Metalizing Equipment Accessories” category recognizes the young start-up for the innovative web guiding technology developed and introduced to the industry. The company has developed ARIS, which has web guiding and sensor technology that provide solutions to many of the industry’s guiding difficulties such as running multiple materials, changes in speed, tension and time wasted because of setups and sensor calibrations.

Judges were impressed by the automated control aspect of the system. “It eliminates a lot of guesswork for the operator, saves time and improves reliability and yields,” notes one panel member.

ARIS features two developments in lateral guide technology to better sense and control material to help with these issues. The first feature is the patented material agnostic sensor technology, which is unaffected by environmental conditions and automatically adapts to any changes in materials from nonwoven to film or from nonporous materials to open weave materials. The second feature is a patented adaptive control algorithm, which immediately corrects after disturbances, splices, or changes in material.

The real plug-and-play system automatically adjusts to individual customer conditions, eliminating time consuming initial setups, sensor and controller calibrations, and other manual adjustments necessary with the technology that has been available to date.

Criteria for this award included: features and benefits – immediate and projected long-term, impact on the Industry, general technical importance, uniqueness and usefulness, and degree of technical contribution by the applicant company to the total technology (when more than one company is involved in the same technology).