Innovative areas

Weight  reduction
This is an important target, for example in the automotive industry, reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. This is reflected in all parts of the vehicle. The replacement of metal parts by thermoplastics has progressed significantly in the past years and new targets for weight reduction in the thermoplastics parts itself come into the picture. This can be achieved by designing  thinner parts and using low density thermoplastic materials. Our product offer both at the same time: its high intrinsic stiffness offers the possibility to design thin-walled parts with relatively low glass fiber contents while maintaining the required stiffness and heat distortion temperatures. The strength of compounds and the high screw torque retention make it possible to reduce the amount of metal clips and reinforcement in the parts.

Process efficiency: from automotive to paper industry
Our SMA products improve downstream process efficiency. In automotive interior parts, like soft instrument panels, our compounds enable you to apply foam and skin layers in a durable way without pre-treating the carrier material by primers or flaming treatments. Painting parts without pre-treatment also offers immediate and high quality paint adhesion. Another typical property of our product is low shrinkage behavior, leading to a stable and consistent production of high-precision parts at high rates with very low scrap numbers. Alternatively our SMA solutions and dispersions are used in binder systems for glass mats or as internal paper sizing agents. The SMA, often combined with other chemical components, provides the binding of fibers. Applying SMA improves the wet strength of these systems, allowing higher throughput in production equipment. Effective dispersing agents can bring a significant cost advantage in a.o. ink emulsions because of high achievable solid contents. Our SMA has proven to be such an effective dispersing agent.

Our bench-scale plant
In order to further develop our products our Product Development team uses a bench-scale plant, providing the unique opportunity to develop new SMA-grades, create samples for customers, create complete new (co) polymers.