David Zwang of WhatTheyThink magazine spoke to Robert Rae about GEW’s latest technology developments.
You can watch the video below, or scroll down for the video transcript.
David Zwang (DZ): Hi, this is Dave Zwang with WhatTheyThink and with me is Rob Rae, who is the Managing Director of GEW. And Rob, it’s great to see you again.
Robert Rae (RR): Hi David, thanks for coming by again.
DZ: So, so Rob, I mean GEW is all about making things dry, basically.
RR: Yes. Cure. Cure.
DZ: Sorry.
RR: Yes.
DZ: And you guys have been doing it for a while and you’re probably one of the best in the business at this point. Let’s start first of all with what’s new and then we’ll talk a little bit more about where we go from here.
RR: But the big thing that’s new for us is this, this cabinet that we’re standing in front of. This is our EOS power and control platform which will, over the next 12 months replace our RHINO and RLT power and control platform. That’s the, that’s the power that drives the lamps we have.
So, our lamps fundamentally aren’t changing, but everything behind them is. And it’s a, it’s a complete revelation because we’re making it ourselves for the first time in the UK. We’ve set up a whole new 5,500 sqm factory to do that, to make the cabinets, to make the distributions, to make the power supplies. We’re going to be doing all of that in-house.
But also it’s a complete redesign of the control and the way that our OEMs, in particular, are able to integrate our products onto their machines. So we are changing the scope of supply they’re able to buy. They’re able to control the power supplies with software. HMIs could morph into being
on their single machine. They can put our power supplies inside their machine. They can control all of that by software without any hardware connections so that they can receive a huge amount of more internet of things telemetry back from the lamps.
So it’s a complete transformation and we call that flexible power. Flexible power, intelligent curing. Flexible power is because OEMs are able to pick and choose what they need for their particular machine and integrate our product onto their platform far more deeply than they ever could do before.
And intelligent curing is, we’re putting chips inside our lamp cassettes so that the lamps themselves become intelligent and they are recording so much more data than they ever did before about how they’re running, what they are, serialisation, telemetry and error codes and feedback, so that, you know, our OEMs will be able to use that data to feed, you know, information and process optimisation, you know, to their customer base. So it’s about, you know, a complete transformation of everything behind the system.
DZ: So basically, if you’re doing it to that level, that’s enabling your OEMs to now adjust or adapt their equipment on the fly. Well, excuse me, the end user, the OEMs can develop against it. But so the, in an end user’s case, because things tend to move in any case, in a production environment, it allows it to adapt.
RR: Well, I think, I think a good way to think about it is we’re, you know, we’re, we’re integrating the systems together. The UV system used to be
or, you know, and is often a piece of peripheral equipment which sits alongside a machine.
DZ: Right.
RR: And more and more, you know, people want to see those two things integrate and be part of one machine, where the machine has access to all of the information on all the peripheral equipment so that it can feed that process optimisation to the customer. And the EOS system is much more open and flexible to enable our machine manufacturers to do that and deliver that service to their customers. And ultimately that’s going to, that’s going to mean we can put our equipment on more different types of machinery and give a better service to our OEMs and, ultimately, to their end users.
DZ: Absolutely. So now this is strictly, at this point, this is not something you can retrofit because I know you have a lot of other units out there in the marketplace. This is really something that’s going to benefit the new OEMs. Ultimately, it will be something that will benefit everybody.
RR: No, we will. Yeah, this will become our standard offering. So, we will retrofit this. Absolutely.
DZ: Oh, you will?
RR: So, when someone wants to retrofit an old piece of machinery, it will come with an EOS system, with an EOS touchscreen and it will replace the RHINO system that we have. So, this is going to replace the entirety of our current offering.
DZ: That would mean the lamps and everything would have to change?
RR: Correct. The lamp, the lamps themselves become intelligent. So they’re not backward, the EOS platform is not backward compatible with our, with our RHINO and RLT system. So it’s a, it’s a break and a new platform for the next 10-15 years on which we’re going to build our systems.
DZ: So this is a significant move?
RR: For us, it’s a hugely significant move. Internal manufacturing, setting
that production up, a complete redesign of all the software, all the hardware that goes into it. But ultimately, the lamps are what delivers the light to, and dries and cures the ink on the customer’s machine. And those have not, while they’re becoming intelligent, the specifications of those have not significantly changed with this EOS introduction.
So for our customers, you know, our end customers, we’ve, we’re much more focusing on things like our process control technology, which we’re, which we’re introducing, technologies like DoseGuard, which enable you to measure the amount of UV, which is coming out of your lamps and create a closed loop control of the UV dose so that you’re always giving the correct amount of light to the ink, no matter the condition of the lamps. It knows the condition of the lamps and automatically adjusts for that in a closed loop. Or our Peak C technology, which is a high-UVC lamp, which enables use of these grafted photoinitiator resins, these “no-photoinitiator” or “no-migration” coatings, which are being talked about more and more, that require a very high UVC output in the 220nm band.
DZ: You have to freeze that immediately.
RR: Exactly, to get those to activate and GEW have our Peak C technology, which addresses that need in the market as people move from solvent-based and water-based processes. They have huge process benefits going to UV, but they, they need to be sure that there’s no migration of photoinitiators into their foodstuffs.
DZ: Very cool. Rob, this sounds exciting man.
RR: So there’s a, yeah there’s a lot to talk about. There’s a, there’s huge, always a huge amount of development at GEW and people should come by and see us if they want to learn more because we can’t cover it all in two seconds.
DZ: Absolutely. Great to see you again.
The original post can be found on the WhatTheyThink website, here.
