Roll slitting

Roll slitting is a shearing operation that cuts a large roll of material into narrower rolls. There are two types of slitting: log slitting and rewind slitting. In log slitting the roll of material is treated as a whole (the 'log') and one or more slices are taken from it without an unrolling/re-reeling process. In rewind slitting the web is unwound and run through the machine, passing through knives or lasers, before being rewound on one or more shafts to form narrower rolls. The multiple narrower strips of material may be known as mults (short for multiple) or pancakes if their diameter is much more than their width. For rewind slitting the machine used is called a slitter rewinder, a slitter or a slitting machine - these names are used interchangeably for the same machines. For particularly narrow & thin products the pancakes become unstable, and then the rewind may be onto a bobbin-wound reel: the rewind bobbins are much wider than the slit width and the web oscillates across the reel as it is rewound. Apart from the stability benefit it is also then possible to put very long lengths, (frequently many tens of kilometres), onto one bobbin.

Several methods are available for soft materials like plastic films and paper. Razor blades, straight, or circular blades are being used. Some blades cut through the material while others crush the material against a hard roll. Those are similar to knives and cut the material into narrow strips, which may be called coils when being rewound. The cutting blades can be set to a desired width. Some machines have many blades to increase the options of cutting widths, others have just a single blade and can be set to a desired location. The slit material is rewound on paper, plastic or metal cores on the exit side of the machine.

The process is used because of its low cost and high precision for mass production. Some machines have a program that monitors the blades and sharpens the blades often to maintain the quality and precision of the cut. Depending on the industry and the product that is being slit these machine can run between 10m/min (special metal webs) and 5000 m/min (paper making process). The machines can also incorporate extensive automation to precisely control material tension, automatically position the slitting knives, automatically align the cores onto which the material is wound and to reduce manual handling of the rolls.

Examples of materials that can be cut this way are: adhesive tape, foam, rubber, paper products, foil, plastics (such as tarps and cling wrap), glass cloth, fabrics, release liner and film.

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