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Imagine you’re the victim of a natural disaster—an earthquake, a hurricane, a flood. Now list the things you’ll need to survive until help arrives. Besides medical care, a source of safe,

drinkable water likely tops your checklist of priorities. Fortunately, you and thou-sands of other survivors of natural disasters have turned to the water-filtration products of Hydration Technology Innovations LCC (HTI). And those products are, in turn, made possible by the Albany, OR-based converter’s newly rebuilt and upgraded casting and drying lines.

At the core of all HTI water filters is an unusual forward-osmosis (FO), cellulosic membrane capable of filtering water mol-ecules out of any liquid (see “Anywater, Anywhere” sidebar). The membrane, manufactured through a custom-engineered high-tech coating system, works similarly to how a tree draws water from damp soil. All contaminants are removed, even down to viruses and bacteria.

“We just made an artificial tree root; basi-cally it’s the same process,” explains Jack Herron, HTI project engineer. “We just make it in sheet form, instead of tiny fibers.”

From the ground upThe brief history of Hydration Technol-

ogy’s membrane production was punctu-ated by a devastating fire that destroyed the manufacturing lines in March 2007. HTI immediately began to build a new plant, which presented the opportunity to not only solve several web-handling problems that had troubled the original lines but also

Hydration Technology’s web-guiding, tension-control makeover fine-tunes its water-filtration membrane product for new applications in new markets.

By Editor in Chief Mark Spaulding

High techat low speed

The drying line now uses a MAGPOWR VERSATEC™ tension control, C-Series clutch and a Fife D-MAX web-guiding system.

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to fine-tune the finished product for new applications to serve new end-use markets. All components were deliv-ered in late 2007, and approved mem-brane was once again being regularly produced in September 2008.

Today, a 5,000-sq-ft plant houses the separate membrane-casting and drying lines as well as R&D facilities to investigate new membrane materi-als. Conversion of membrane into fin-

ished products (shown below), including new spiral-wound filters in sev-eral configura-tions is han-dled in a larger 24,000-sq-ft plant. Other

operations include raw-material slit-ting/rewinding, bagforming, RF-weld-ing of pouches, manual filling/sealing and final product quality control.

In its production, the membrane begins as a cellulose polymer dis-solved in a proprietary collection of solvents. Using a standard coating method, this solution is applied to a back web, which may be either a woven or wet-laid nonwoven fiber. The ultra-thin, asymmetrical coating is partly infused into the back web. Finished rolls are transferred to the drying line, where a non-volatile coat-ing is applied to the web. Lastly, the treated material is run through a con-vection dryer and rewound.

slow and steady wins the race

“It’s a very slow process and a very high-value product,” says Herron. So, as elsewhere in converting, the challenge is to get your tension control and edge guiding to act really fast to handle a super-fast process, here it’s to get it to back off enough and yet be very precise. We needed stabil-ity at slow speeds, especially

with a long length of very thin material between unwind and rewind.”

Key to the smooth operation and improved efficiency of the new lines are several web-handling components supplied by the Maxcess Intl. divisions (www.maxcessintl.com) of Fife Corp., Tidland Corp. and MAGPOWR.

“We’re so slow that you could do a pretty good job with manual web con-trol, but you’d have to constantly tweak it to make it work,” explains Steven W. Peterson, HTI senior project engineer. Manual guiding was good enough to make rolls later converted in-house, but HTI is now seeking to do high-speed, form-fill-seal product manufac-turing and contract packaging. “If we were going to make more of our spiral-wound product, we needed better web guiding,” he adds. “We had one very skilled operator, but we couldn’t clone him to do all manual guiding.”

At the casting-line unwind now are a Fife Kamberoller® steering guide (provides immediate lateral correc-tion), a Fife SE-22 infrared sensor

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SpEciFicS:HYDRATiON TEcHNOLOGY iNNOVATiONS LLc: Albany, OROpERATiONS: Forward-osmosis filtration-membrane casting; coat-ing/laminating; slitting/rewinding; bag/pouchmaking; spiral-wound membrane filter manufacturingpLANT SiZES 5,000-sq-ft casting facility; 24,000-sq-ft converting facilityEMpLOYEES: 35

At the casting-line unwind are a Fife Kamberoller® steering guide, a Fife SE-22 infra-red sensor (above) and a MAGPOWR “C” Series magnetic-particle clutch.

(capable of sensing the porous back web) and a MAG-POWR “C” Series magnetic-particle clutch (driven the opposite way to achieve the right amount of differential speed with the motor). Overseeing these components are a MAGPOWR Cygnus® web-tension control (allows adjust-ments using multifunction “smart keys” and a large backlit display) and a Fife D-MAX Series web-guiding system (pre-wired and pre-integrated for fast setup). The D-MAX is said to provide even higher dynamic response than pre-vious controllers and displays text, guiding nomenclature and web-guide graphics on a 122 x 92 mm LCD.

Wrinkling had been a big issue with the membrane-casting process because the web is typically only 3.5-mils thick, Peterson says. The real struggle was with tension control along the full length from unwind to rewind.

“There’s a lot of festooning of the material in the casting tanks, so you get some stretching, and the unwind and rewind can start fighting with each other,” he explains. “Maxcess worked with us on stabilizing those tension fluctuations that gave us the wrinkling. It all works well now. It’s pretty boring, but that’s a good thing.”

Unusual core-shaft comboIn HTI’s original plant, changing rolls was a slow,

complicated process that Peterson and Herron sought to remedy with the new lines. The converter now uses Tidland Series 800 GX ultra-lightweight aluminum shafts and Boschert safety chucks throughout the two facilities’ unwinds and rewinds. An older Arrow slitter/rewinder used to trim out-of-spec raw-material rolls prior to coating has also been retrofitted with these components. “They are very nice, inflatable bladder-type shafts, and we found them to be very convenient,” Peterson says.

Because part of HTI’s membrane-casting process takes place underwater, and the finished web must be kept moist, the company’s roll cores are actually PVC piping. “Tidland specified a shaft that could handle the loads we had and still get good traction on wet PVC pipe,” Herron says.

Prior to full-production startup in September 2008, HTI experienced some tension-control problems on its drying line. Maxcess assisted with the MAGPOWR VER-SATEC™ tension controller (uses an ultrasonic sensor to measure distance and roll diameter) and retrofitting to a larger C-Series MAGPOWR clutch. “These changes got the line running smoothly,” Peterson says.

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22 www.convertingmagazine.com® FEBRUARY 2010

“AnYWAteR, AnYWHeRe” ViA FORWARD OSMOSiS

Albany, OR-based converter Hydration Technology innova-tions LLc’s unusual Forward Osmosis (FO) process for water filtration can provide life-saving, drinkable water from the most disgusting sources you can imagine (tire ruts, floodwaters, ditches, stagnant ponds). Just ask some of the survivors of Hur-ricane Katrina or the US military personnel (above) that helped them or thousands of other people hit by natural disasters…or even some of the millions who live every day without a source of safe, drinking water.

Manufactured on a custom low-speed, high-tech coating line, the FO filtration membrane works similarly to the way trees draw water from damp soil or how people absorb the water they drink—by separating water molecules from nearly any liquid. The water passes through but larger molecules such as salts, proteins, viruses, bacteria and parasites are all blocked. Much like Reverse Osmosis but instead of applying high pressure to squeeze water from a solution, FO uses a solution with high osmotic potential to draw water through the membrane from a solution of low osmotic potential.

The company’s extensive line of personal-hydration prod-ucts range from the HydroWell™ that filters up to 40 liters/day down to the X-pack™ that processes six liters. Most of the products include sugar syrup to flavor the filtered water, which is safe to drink but doesn’t necessarily taste very good without a little help. The syrup is not just for flavoring, though. its sugar molecules provide the osmotic driving force for filtration, which runs without the pumping pressure typical of Reverse Osmosis.

HTi is also working on its SAFE infant Formula pouch,™ a way to reconstitute infant formula (using water filtered by the FO membrane) via a low-cost, easy-to-use zippered pouch. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the beta-tested HydroW-ell Village, which can produce 800 liters/day per membrane bundle, will support small remote communities or be used in disaster relief.

But drinking water is just the start. The FO filtration tech-nology has applications for numerous industries such as oil and gas exploration, food processing, algae biofuels, methane digestion and pharmaceuticals. For example, filter elements are being used to treat pitwater in natural-gas wells, eliminat-ing the need to transport truckloads of water into and out of remote energy-exploration areas.

“We have one very skilled operator, but we couldn’t clone him to do

all manual guiding.”Steven peterson

HTi Senior project Engineer

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In early 2009, the D-MAX Series web-guiding system and control-ler was added as well. HTI opera-tors prefer the new components because of their intuitive ease-of-use. “It’s been a real, clean retrofit after our startup,” Peterson says.

experienced extrapolation

Both he and Herron have high praise for all the Maxcess Intl. engi-neers they worked with during the casting and drying line rebuilds. Because web-handling had been totally manual in the past, using only MAGPOWR clutches, very little information was available (mainly web widths and roll diam-eters) to help specify the proper components and controls.

“We had been inventing the

whole [membrane-casting] process as we went along,” Peterson says, but the end result has been thor-oughly successful.

What’s ahead for Hydration Technology Innovations? With its purchase in March 2009 by Scott-sdale, AZ-based holding company Innovations Management, plans for a major boost in production capac-ity include designing a new mem-brane line to be sited nearby or in the existing casting-line building.

Editor’s Note: At presstime, HTI was shipping its HydroPack and HydroWell Village products to Haiti as part of international earth-quake relief efforts. The donated supplies will provide at least 6,000 people with one liter of clean drinking water each day.

MORE iNFO:conVeRteR:HYDRATiON TEcHNOLOGY iNNOVATiONS Lcc, 541/917-3335, www.htiwater.comsUppLIeRs:FiFE cORp., 800/639-3433, www.fife.com/htMAGpOWR, 800/639-3433, www.magpowr.com/htTiDLAND cORp., 800/426-1000, www.tidland.com/ht

Above: Overseeing the casting-line web-handling components are a MAG-POWR Cygnus® web-tension control and a Fife D-MAX Series web-guiding system. top left: Uncoated substrate moves past HTI senior project engi-neer Steven Peterson in the casting-line area. Bottom left: Process opera-tor Mike Flores checks the new web-handling controls on the casting line.