Pilot Line - 11
Establishing of a development environment for bio-based particle foams
- Application: Consumer goods, Packaging
- Development: Formulation
Current status
The transfer of nano-scaled additives into lightweight foams with e.g. increased mechanical properties is not market available. Development of petro- or bio-based particle foams is currently made either by large companies or by research institutes. A service for (smaller) companies to receive small (or even large) amounts of materials like new particle foams, which are tailored to their needs, applications and products is not offered in the market at the moment.
PL upgrading will increase the production capacity to 10-50 kg/h (50% implementation speed increase to reach the final product, due to having all necessary processing steps and the respective Know-How in one place)
The setup of the INN-PRESSME foam pilot line achieves drastically quicker feedback cycles and therefore development time (> 60% faster) due to the integration of advanced characterization technologies (like gas-loaded melt viscosity, foamability, moulding properties) giving close to real-time feedback about the achieved material properties, reducing the feedback time from hours to minutes for many important material characteristics.
Challenge
The Fraunhofer ICT particle foaming pilot line will enable a fully controlled development/ production environment for particle foams tailored to the needs of the respective customers with nano-scaled additives incorporation to (bio)polymers to increase functionality, e.g. anti-microbial properties. Particle foams are produced, tested and characterized e.g. for pre-foaming and moulding.
Further development
Benefits for companies and SME’s
Product ideas existing at companies can be transferred into products much faster with the help of the new and upgraded pilot line available after INN-PRESSME and for pilot series production, increasing the innovation rate of companies in the bio-sector.
Faster development cycles and real-time characterisation methods integrated in INN-PRESSME enables better understanding of the material-process-properties relationship for a new material as soon as the customer decides to move from pilot to industrial scale. This will allow the establishment of more productive (estimated to be about 30%) and especially stable production processes.
This results in reduced off-spec production and quicker process ramp-up during the transfer to the customers’ production, reducing waste production in total by 25%.