The Exilva Blog

In the world of corrugated board production, it's not just about making boxes; it's about delivering quality, savings, and a bottom-line boost. But what's often standing in the way? Warp – the elusive problem that can impact everything from quality to customer satisfaction. It's time for a game-changer, and it comes in the form of Exilva, a natural and bio-based performance enhancer.

Our world is facing massive disruptions lately. Barely any service, raw material or product goes untouched through this period. Even the starch supply chain is facing wicked times, and every corrugator is affected by the massive price increase for starch. What if you could reduce your glue consumption by more than 15% just by adding a biobased additive to your existing recipe?

The corrugated business is an industry always in development. After five years of looking into the corrugated industry and how Exilva can be applied to different glue recipes, we have seen elevating results at more than 70 corrugators around the world. Timer after time customer’s state great results. Our latest success story involves a trip to one of the biggest players in the industry. Our common mission was to fix edge delamination that occurs at slitter scorer on double wall and heavy single wall. Names and location of the customer has been anonymized. 

In this blog post we have collected our key learnings from working with corrugated board in over 170 trials. You will find information about reduced starch consumption, prolonged stability of viscosity in starch adhesives, robustness, increased productivity, bonding quality and how to fight warp. Finally, we share feedback and learnings from customers!

To wrap up this corrugated boards application series we finish with a focus on warp. Warp is one of the most common problems that corrugated board manufacturers face. Producing bent or twisted boards results in excessive scrap, waste and reduced production rates. There may be a number of factors that contribute to this problem; leaving out the machinery and focusing on the moisture control in the bonding process, what happens when we add Exilva (Microfibrillar Cellulose, MFC) to the adhesive?

The bonding quality determines the ultimate strength of the corrugated board. In my previous blog post I revealed increased speed results for the production of corrugated boards. In this blog post I have investigated what effect Exilva Microfibrillated Cellulose (MFC) has on bond strength.

Having demonstrated the viscosity stabilizing effect of Exilva in starch adhesives, for this third blog post in the corrugated boards application series, I will focus on the effect on glue ability and production speed.

In a previous blog post, I explained how the new technology of Exilva microfibrillated cellulose may improve the viscosity stability of starch adhesives. Here is the second blog post in the corrugated boards application series, and now I have entered the glue kitchen of a corrugated boards manufacturer to evaluate the robustness and stability effects of Exilva.

Starch is a natural polymer found in many processes either as an adhesive or a thickener. Following paper production, corrugated board is the second largest application of non-food starches globally, where it it used as an adhesive between the fluting and liners. The control of the adhesive viscosity during process and storage is critical. However, despite further developments regarding the formulation of starch adhesives, the viscosity is commonly not stable enough over extended periods of time, in particular over weekend storage. In this first of a series of blog posts with the corrugated boards application as the example, I will give an introduction to this problem, and the new technology of Exilva, a microfibrillated cellulose, to solve it.