What Is Roll-to-Roll? Applications and Required Technologies

What Is Roll-to-Roll?

Roll-to-roll is a manufacturing process in which materials supplied in roll form, such as film, paper, and metal foil, are continuously unwound, processed, and rewound.

It is used in a wide range of industries, including food packaging, pharmaceutical packaging, building materials, functional films, electronic materials, corrugated board, and rechargeable-battery materials.

Roll-to-Roll Process Overview

What Is Roll-to-Roll?

Benefits of the Roll-to-Roll Method

The roll-to-roll method offers the following advantages:

  • emoji_objects High productivity through continuous production
  • emoji_objects Consistent quality along the roll length
  • emoji_objects Efficient processing of large-area and long materials

For high-volume production, it offers the advantage of maximizing equipment utilization while reducing costs.

A Key Point in Roll-to-Roll: Tension Control

Roll-to-roll is an efficient manufacturing process; however, careful tension control is essential.
When the web path becomes longer, stress on the substrate increases, which can lead to quality issues such as wrinkles, elongation, and breakage, as well as reduced yield.
Although adding substrate transport rollers as intermediate drive sections can help reduce and distribute stress throughout the system, the increased number of drive sections requires more sophisticated control.

Drive Control Systems for Stable Roll-to-Roll Transport

Through our specialized product lineup and comprehensive support as an expert roll-to-roll control manufacturer, we enable more reliable and safer advanced roll-to-roll drive control.

Features of Our Control Systems
build Customize control software for your roll-to-roll equipment
  • Modularize the functions required for each drive section
  • Easily adaptable to a wide range of equipment, including printing presses, coaters, laminators, and stretching machines
build Achieve advanced machine synchronization to minimize fluctuations and misalignment
  • Dedicated Ethernet-based communication method
  • Effective for high-speed, high-precision synchronization-control applications
build Professional support for commissioning and immediate on-site condition analysis
  • Extensive dedicated adjustment tools and functions
  • Easy synchronized analysis of tension fluctuations and mechanical vibration using high-speed multi-axis monitoring and FFT analysis
Our Drive Control System Product Lineup
  • Drive control system for Roll-to-Roll: System MXⅡ

    System MXⅡ integrates our drive-control technologies and uses coordinated multi-axis control to flexibly support a wide range of roll‑to‑roll transport equipment configurations.

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    Drive control system for Roll-to-Roll: System MXⅡ
  • Smart drive control system: System MXs

    System MXs makes it easy to build tension control for compact, narrow-width roll‑to‑roll transport equipment.
    Packaged professional control technology that helps reduce the engineering effort required for software design and system tuning.

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    Smart drive control system: System MXs

This article introduced the features and applications of roll-to-roll and the drive control systems required for roll-to-roll transport equipment.
Roll-to-roll is a highly productive transport method, but it is extremely important to systemize drive-motor control and stabilize the tension of the transported substrate.
If you would like to improve and stabilize the transport accuracy of existing equipment, please feel free to contact us.