Yes, we skipped exhibiting at Converters Expo last year, but we are back. After the hiatus in trade show attendance, it’s good to see Converters face to face. Better yet, we enjoy helping Converters solve problems that might seem unsolvable. 

This year we are sending two of our experts to work with you in solving your problem in web guiding and monitoring. Whether it’s an issue with edge, center or line guiding in a specialty area, or a difficult monitoring application, we have developed the technology to solve many problems in the industry.

In 2020 we hosted a webinar on web guiding applications and advanced web guiding concepts as a continuation of the educational series web guiding fundamentals. This webinar was the follow up on our seminar on Web Guiding Fundamentals, presented earlier that year, and commented in a series of blog posts in 2021. We would like to share some comments on the points presented in this webinar in the form of a series of blogs.

Converting applications will typically require some type of guiding. It can be in the form of terminal or intermediate web guides, each with the peculiar conditions required to provide an effective placement of the web guide. However, all these applications are used in environments subject to atmospheric conditions. One of the most challenging web guiding applications deals with vacuum web guiding.

So far we have discussed the different types of web guiding systems for converting applications. You now should know the different types of web guiding systems, and their design and installation recommendations. Also, you should have an idea of why web guiding is needed and where they should be installed in converting operations. In this blog post we will address a component of a web guiding system, the web guide actuators.

End and Center Pivot Guides - Not a commonly used web guide in the industry

End and center pivot guides do not displace the web, they only have the angle of rotation to reposition the web. This makes them very slow in term of response, and therefore, are not an ideal choice in web guiding options.

A web guiding system for converting operations has four main components:  

• Guide Structure/Mechanism
• Actuator
• Sensor
• Controller

However, even though we mention four main components, the web has to be considered a component of the web guiding system.

Intermediate Web Guides

Used before a critical process in the converting line 

In our previous post on web guiding fundamentals, we mentioned the terminal web guides. These are web guides that are found at the start or the end of the process. Their location is usually on an unwind or a rewind stand. As we discussed, their installation depends on whether the guiding system is used for unwinding a roll of web or rewind a processed web into a roll.