Medical Device Link.

NEWS

The HH Zed series sealers support high-speed production in preapplied adhesive applications.

Child-resistant blister packaging presents challenges for in-line heat sealing. Carded and walleted blisters may feature multilayer constructions, perforated windows, and multiple doors that require selective or partial sealing of sections of the package. Sealers usually have to penetrate multiple paperboard layers, while protecting the tablets and capsules from heat exposure.

Zed Industries (Dayton, OH) offers multistation, dual-heating heat-seal technology for handling these complex designs. The HH Zed series sealers support high-speed production in preapplied adhesive applications, rivaling the speed of lower-cost high-speed hot-melt systems, where the adhesive is applied on demand in-line. Suspension tooling used in HH Zed series supports cycle speed by minimizing heat sync loss.

The dual-head sealing allows selective sealing on both sides of the matrix, when top and bottom platens press together to seal the outer carding to the carded blister. The dual-head method, combined with the multistation sealing where the material is hit a second time, can double cycle speeds, says Peter Zelnick, CEO, Zed Industries.

“In wallet-style designs, you may be sealing three- to five-layer matrixes with materials that often require lower sealing temperatures. A single station sealer might have to hold the dwell for three seconds to give the heat time to migrate through the matrix. We use a secondary station to hit it twice at half the total dwell time, so you are increasing output,” says Zelnick.

Pharmaceutical companies have favored preapplied adhesives for creating tamper-resistant packages, but sacrifice speed in these applications using standard heat sealers. Counterfeiters can use an iron to disassemble a hot-melt package, pirate the product, and reassemble the package. Packaging made with heat-seal adhesives cannot be opened without damaging the ink and artwork, Zelnick says.

Selective heating also addresses the pharmaceutical market’s need to protect embedded RFID labels or chips.

“You want the wallet to lay as flat as possible. Using dual platens, we bring heat from the top and from the reciprocal tooling underneath to apply partial heating to specific areas. This protects the chip and delivers enough total heat for a tight integral bond,” he says.

In PLC format, cycle parameters are logged for electronic or printout recording, with alarm sequences and shut down when set points are exceeded.

“Some clients will not take a PLC, others want every piece of documentation they can get. If they go with the PLC function, we are reporting the pressure value at every point on the seal. Users can display the values from multiple temperature probes, or an aggregate value through mean averaging software,” says Zelnick.

The PLC sealers provide detailed HMI feedback when parameters are breached to support troubleshooting by shift operators that are often not highly trained, says Zelnick.

Errors codes are displayed with photos of the customer’s machine that highlight the component causing the problem.

Zed Industries has experienced demand from both material suppliers and end-users for its Z-Test benchtop sealers, for quality testing of materials prior to in-line production. Quality assurance personnel use the $8000 10 × 10-in. unit to set process parameters and make a seal to see, for example, if lots exhibit specified adhesive properties. Zelnick says that medical companies harvesting biomaterials with low packaging volume requirements have adopted a cleanroom version, the Z-Test, as a production unit.