When Ludwig von Hart­mann acquired a mechan­ical cotton spin­ning mill in Hei­den­heim over 200 years ago, he would have never imag­ined that one day his com­pany would rev­o­lu­tionize wound care. It was his visionary son Paul Hart­mann senior, who built a dressing mate­rial fac­tory and, together with his part­ners, pro­duced the first anti­septic wound dress­ings – a rev­o­lu­tion in med­i­cine that rapidly reduced patient mortality.

Since the early 19th cen­tury, prod­ucts made by today’s PAUL HART­MANN AG have been helping to treat small and large wounds all over the world – be it a child’s scraped knee or a wound that is dif­fi­cult to heal and requires inno­v­a­tive solu­tions. These include, for example, a high-tech wound dressing with a sili­cone wound con­tact layer, which is not only self-adhe­sive but also atrau­matic, thus enabling almost pain­less dressing changes. This type of modern wound treat­ment is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for per­sis­tent chronic wounds.

HART­MANN and Harro Höfliger look back on more than two decades of suc­cessful coop­er­a­tion in the field of classic and modern wound man­age­ment prod­ucts. The processes for man­u­fac­turing, fin­ishing and bag­ging of this sil­i­cone product with its inno­v­a­tive mate­rials have also been jointly devel­oped. In addi­tion, Harro Höfliger received the order for an auto­mated car­toning machine for the products.

“Some spe­cial wound dressing for­mats are not yet pro­duced on high-per­for­mance sys­tems. To achieve greater effi­ciency, it was impor­tant for us to inte­grate a high-per­for­mance car­toning machine into the line; this will enable us to flex­ibly cover the entire product range,” says Bernd Ott, Senior Tech­nical Project Coor­di­na­tion Man­ager at the HART­MANN GROUP.

“We inte­grated a high-per­for­mance car­toning machine. This will enable us to flex­ibly cover the entire product range.”Bernd Ott, Senior Tech­nical Project Coor­di­na­tion Man­ager at the HART­MANN GROUP

Cur­rently under design and con­struc­tion is an approx­i­mately 30 meter long turnkey line con­sisting of web-pro­cessing PMK and con­tin­uous car­toning machine MKC 15″. One of the core processes is the com­bi­na­tion of the most diverse mate­rial layers: Both hydrophobic and hydrophilic com­po­nents are com­bined to meet the high user requirements.

Up to 80 car­tons per minute

Every single wound dressing made by HART­MANN aims to con­tribute to improved wound healing, and this requires per­fect quality. The wound patches are indi­vid­u­ally pack­aged into four-side sealed pouches, printed with the product data and then for­warded to the MKC 15″.

Two cas­cade feeders group the desired number of pouches into stacks and transfer them to the product trans­port of the car­toner. This enables the con­tin­uous lat­eral filling of up to 80 folding car­tons per minute with pouches and pre­folded package inserts, fol­lowed by closing and printing with rel­e­vant data. Here too, sen­sors and camera sys­tems are used for quality mon­i­toring so that flaw­less prod­ucts can help to heal large and small wounds.

Down­load this article as PDF file

Photos: Adobe Stock/pingpao, Hartmann