GERMANY
BICMA Hygiene Technologie GmbH, which has been part of the W+D Group since 2018, is in this exceptional year 2020 celebrating its 25th anniversary. The engineering company, based in Mayen-Koblenz, with the support of W+D as a strong partner – has expanded its product portfolio. Reacting to the worldwide shortage and peak demand for high quality lower cost face masks, the W+D/BICMA hygiene group of Winkler+Dünnebier has developed a fully automatic, high-speed face mask converting line for the production of high quality disposable face masks, Auxilium FM.
The new converting line has a speed of up to 150 m/min (492 ft/min) / up to 800 face masks per minute and is able to produce up to 1 million high quality face masks per day − making it one of the fastest mask production machines in the world.
Frank Eichhorn, managing director of W+D and BICMA, commented: “The corona crisis and the acute lack of face masks prompted us to rise to this new challenge together: Within just a few weeks, we designed a completely new high-speed machine, the Auxilium FM, capable of producing high volumes of up to one million face masks a day.
"In this way, we are also making our contribution to help society by ensuring that the situation that prevailed at the beginning of the Corona pandemic will never happen again. In that, we in the western world, develop and produce machines for the manufacture of surgical masks and no longer have to depend on individual production countries and complete shortages, as was the case in March and April," explained Eichhorn.
