Scaling up our plastic additives is an essential process on the way to their market maturity. At the beginning of the year, we at Polytives already reported on a new investment that should make our lab team’s work easier. Now that we have been able to familiarize ourselves a little with its handling, we would like to introduce our latest acquisition here and explain the benefits it will bring to our customers. Especially in the context of our service, where we not only develop individualized plastic additives for plastics processors, but also provide them in relevant quantities for testing, our investment will lead to a significant process shortening. Find out more here.

Different steps are necessary for the production of our polymer plastic additives. One of them is the work-up at the end of each reaction, which results in the high-quality product that our customers in the plastics processing industry use. These steps can be reproduced relatively well on a small scale in an efficient manner. However, as soon as it gets into the upscaling process – as many who deal with this know all too well – many things are no longer so trivial. Scaling up our plastic additives therefore requires a lot of technical know-how and appropriate equipment.

We would like to be a little more specific and give a brief insight into the possibilities we have gained through the acquisition, which will serve to scale up new products, also in the context of customer projects. Thanks to the support of the Free State of Thuringia and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), we were able to expand our technology with a so-called thin-film distillation plant.

This plant facilitates the separation of solvents from our polymers and, above all, makes it much more efficient. The end product, our plastic additive, is not only drier and purer – our laboratory team can also bundle many time-consuming, small-scale work steps. This frees up resources for further developments and optimizations. The reprocessing process is significantly accelerated, the throughput of our product is increased immensely, and the scaling of our additives almost runs by itself. In addition, the separated solvents can be collected safely and conveniently in this way, also as part of a tailor-made solution for our customers, and reprocessed for reuse. Conserving resources and working efficiently, we thus contribute to sustainability while still offering all the advantages of scaling up to the kilogram scale for our customers.

Even if individual operating refinements can still be further optimized (after all, you never stop learning), Polytives GmbH is pleased with this helpful, indeed necessary, investment. It is another step that shortens the prototyping phase and brings us closer to our goals even faster.