Introduction to Static Control for Roll-to-Roll Manufacturing

Roll-to-Roll (R2R) manufacturing is used extensively in printing and flexible packaging industries. These markets exceed $ \$ $30B annually in the US [1]. Static ignitions injury employees. Electrical charge stored on wound rolls shocks operators and disrupt machine operations. Static causes sheet sticking and sparks damage products. I estimate that injuries, product waste, and machine downtime caused by static electricity exceeds $ \$ $600M annually (2%) in the US. This human suffering and waste may be eliminated by static control systems. Implementing effective static control on an R2R manufacturing line is a 4-step, data-driven process. First, identify sources of static charging with a static survey. Next, install static dissipaters forming a fault-tolerant static control system. Once static dissipaters are operational, verify that static is well controlled with another, static survey. Finally, maintain static performance by including static control in operations including regularly inspecting static dissipaters and including static control in Management of Change (MoC) procedures.