Georgia, USA
Foss Floors is a pioneer of non-woven needle punch floor coverings and specialty flooring products. The products are made in three high-tech, computer-controlled production facilities in Rome and Chatsworth, Georgia, US. Foss Floors is solidly committed to producing environmentally friendly floorings.
Recycled PET polyester from used plastic drink bottles is used exclusively for production. As a result, 18,000 tonnes of plastic are recycled annually, which equate to approximately two billion plastic bottles. The basic materials are used in needle-punch machinery to make materials for floorings.
Forbo Movement Systems supplies processing belts, which are used in the various manufacturing applications, for this machinery.
Recently, this has also included processing belts for conveying the nonwovens behind the crosslapper. The crosslapper’s task is to fold the nonwoven in a particular way, to position or stack it before it’s transferred to the processing belt.
These belts can be up to 8 meters in size. The previous belts had plastic slats with a specific profile to grip the fiber mat in a particular way depending on the application.
The major disadvantage of this design is that the slats break and can get into the needling machine. This can cause substantial damage to the needles, which can entail enormous costs totaling several tens of thousands of dollars.
This is where our modular belt system Prolink series 8 made of polypropylene comes in. This is a smart solution that overcomes this weak point. Using the Prolink modular belts to convey nonwovens behind the crosslapper has proved to be very productive. Because our Prolink modular belts are much better at conveying fiber material and nonwovens at all processing stages and eliminating the risk of a slat breakage with the serious consequences entailed. This is achieved by an NSK2 surface pattern with an improved, semi-circular design that prevents fibers from sticking. The new NSK2 pattern (non-skid) was custom-developed for the nonwovens industry.
Foss Floors is now benefiting from the robustness and efficiency of the Prolink modular belts. The Forbo team fitted this innovative solution so that the original form-fit timing belt drive was replaced by a friction drive using a roughened drive drum. Afterward, guides made of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene were fitted on both sides of the frame to guide the belt precisely. Since then, the system has been working perfectly. To benefit from this advanced solution, Foss Floors plans to carry out more of these retrofits this year.
