Carestream Tollcoating, a  provider of toll coating services specializing in aqueous and solvent coatings on flexible substrates, significantly expanded its contract manufacturing services in 2013 to improve product development and scale-up capabilities for its advanced technology customers.

In 2013, Carestream Tollcoating:
·       Established a new Coating Assessment Laboratory at its Windsor, Colorado manufacturing facility. The lab enhances the company¹s ability to predict how a specific coating solution and substrate system will behave in various manufacturing operations ensuring product specifications are met at the laboratory scale before investing in larger pilot and manufacturing trials. The assessment process provides valuable insight for perfecting long-term process economics and quality as well as setting product development direction ­ at extremely low cost. This allows products to move to the commercial scale more quickly with ultimately fewer trial runs on pilot and manufacturing machines, which makes product scale-up quicker and more cost efficient.

·       Extended its fleet of pilot coaters to help deliver faster prototyping and scale-up at minimal cost, and reduce time-to-market for customers coating advanced material solutions onto flexible substrates. The new pilot coaters feature proprietary coating techniques, enhanced drying methods and streamlined solution delivery systems.

·       Expanded product and process engineering resources to support increased production and manufacturing expertise in the automotive, battery, electronics, membrane and other sectors.
·       Allied with Polaris Battery Labs to accelerate the launch of new battery materials and technologies. The collaboration leverages the capabilities of both companies for customers interested in anode and cathode electrode development and processing as well as new separator membranes.

·       Shared, through its ³Industry Insights² blog, technical articles on a range of topics including economics of precision multilayer coating, barrier films for enhanced packaging, online defect mapping and inspection techniques, quality assurance, substrate curl and more.

·       Presented sessions at industry conferences, including the AIMCAL Web Coating and Handling Conference.