PETpla.net Insider 09 / 2015

PACKING / PALLETISING 41 PET planet insider Vol. 16 No. 09/15 www.petpla.net Test equipment for PET – inspired by glass bottle manufacturing by Kay Barton www.stf-group.de ENGINEERING WITH THE COMPETENCE OF THE RECYCLER r Complete Plastic Sorting and Washing Lines engineered by Europe’s largest PET Recycler r Bottle-to-Bottle rPET Recycling r More than 60 PET Recycling Lines installed worldwide www.stf-group.de The gap between idea and feasibility in bottle manufacture is an ongoing topic within the sector. Appropriate instru- ments for measuring and analysis within the production pro- cess have become essential over the decades, in particular due to the advance of the trend towards savings in materials and lightweight applications. We visited the test equipment forging company Agr International in Butler, in the west of Pennsylvania, which, viewed on a global scale, has made a significant contribution to the further development of stretch blow moulding processes. Here in their present head offices we meet David Dineff, Global Product Marketing Director, and Robert S. Cowden, Chief Operating Officer. Agr originally stood for American Glass Research and was the historic root from which the company devel- oped. The physicist and founder of the company, Dr. Frank Preston, moved to Pennsylvania in 1926, an event of global importance as far as the PET world is concerned. At that time West Pennsylvania was a glass manufactur- ing hotspot with a considerable propor- tion to glass bottles. Under the name of “Preston Laboratories” Dr. Preston embarked on research in the problem area of bottle manufacture. He subse- quently developed measuring methods and instruments for early fault detec- tion for what was at the time a market which was still in its infancy but already showing strong growth based on high demand. The first designs for a very wide range of test equipment started to emerge. At the beginning of the 1960s Dr. Preston, who was already getting on in years, sold the company to his employee Henry Dimmick Sr. and his partners. The sale involved chang- ing the company’s name to American Glass Research. The company pushed ahead with setting up a division for the actual production of machinery for purposes of testing and analysis. New types of developments emerged for burst pressure and coating measure- ments of containers. The main devel- opment, however, that first made Agr famous, was a machine for real time measurement of the wall thickness of glass containers at manu- facturing speed (OLT -on-line thickness). It was the OLT that actually kickstarted the commercial manufac- ture of systems of this kind in-house. Up to day, approx. 2,000 of these have been sold globally. With the start of the 80s and the rise of plastic packaging, the company simply adapted its technol- ogy to this new sector and, with the subse- quent growth of the PET market, placed the focus fairly and squarely on the PET bottle and the manu- facturing requirements typically associated with it. In order to prevent any confusion as far as the glass seg- ment was concerned, the company brand name was simultane-