High Barrier Metallized Films and Elimination of Starry Night Defects with BOBST DarkNight®
Defects on metallized films lead to a drastic deterioration of barrier properties and poor visuals known in the industry as “Starry Night”. Reduced water vapour and oxygen barrier in turn translate in to a reduction in shelf life of food products.
BOBST DarkNight® for Higher Barrier Metallized Film
In order to meet the increasingly demanding standards in the flexible packaging industry for barrier applications and products with longer shelf life, BOBST has developed DarkNight®, a unique and innovative process to produce High Barrier metallized films through its K5000 and K4000 vacuum metallizing platforms.
Traditionally, thin Aluminium foils are used as a barrier in laminate structures to protect products from moisture and oxygen permeation, UV light radiation and aroma/mineral oils migration but leading brand owners now want to reduce their Aluminium foil consumption in order to reduce packaging costs but also need a more consistent quality in their supply chain of metallized films.
As BOBST is known in the industry as a process specialist, it was a natural step to use this know-how to develop an innovative solution which is a major step forward in the journey to full Aluminium foil replacement.
Cost-effective Solution
BOBST DarkNight® is the smarter way to achieve high barrier metallized films at a lower cost; a major cost advantage arises from the fact that it eliminates the need to use high Optical Density (OD) deposition levels (>3.0 OD) in order to achieve high OTR & WVTR barrier values; as is usually required for high barrier applications.
Superior Packaging Protection
The BOBST DarkNight® process works in conjunction with BOBST Hawkeye (which comes as standard) which along with the Optimised Web-Handling System provides a new approach to defect reduction which enables the production of higher barrier films.
Enhanced barrier performance means superior packaging protection properties (permeation resistance) resulting in increased shelf life for food products; in addition the effective light barrier properties which BOBST DarkNight® provides protects products which are particularly sensitive to UV rays.
Defect Reduction, Improved Barrier and Improved Visuals
The BOBST DarkNight® process provides film producers and converters with three key advantages: Defect reduction, Improved barrier levels and Improved visual appearance of the film.
