German compounder Akro-Plastic (Niederzissen; www.akro-plastic.com) is planning a series of expansions in 2018 and 2019 across its global network. The company revealed the plans at the 12th “Kunststoff-Dia(hr)Log” conference, which was held on 15-16 May at its plant in Niederzissen / Germany. The event attracted 131 guests from 13 countries.

In the third quarter of 2018, a first production line for long fibre reinforced thermoplastic (LFT) will go into operation at Niederzissen. At the same time, Akro-Plastic will start up a second compounding line in Itupeva, São Paulo / Brazil. In the second half of 2018, the compounder plans to start operating a third production line for its Bio-Fed branch. Plans are also in place to expand production at its plant in Suzhou, Jiangsu / China, in late 2018 and early 2019.

Akro-Plastic announced earlier this year that it was collaborating with Poland’s Grupa Azoty Compounding (GAC, Tarnów; www.grupaazoty.com) to set up a plant in Tarnów / Poland – see Plasteurope.com of 16.01.2018. “This is an expertise and consulting contract through which Akro-Plastic will assist and advise GAC until production is underway,” explained Leander Bergmann, Akro-Plastic’s head of marketing.

The two-day conference included a series of presentations around the theme “material development in the digital age”. Volker Gorzelitz from M.TEC Ingenieurgesellschaft für kunststofftechnische Produktentwicklung (Herzogenrath / Germany; www.mtec-engineering.de) talked about the available technology for developing components with digital assistance, while Martin Wolter from Kostal Kontakt Systeme (Lüdenscheid / Germany; www.kostal-kontakt-systeme.de) gave a detailed explanation on the increasing requirements for plastic in high-voltage plug-in connectors.

Maiko Ersch from the Institute for Plastics Processing (IKV) at RWTH Aachen University (Aachen / Germany; www.ikv-aachen.de) discussed the challenges of fibre orientation and curvature in computer simulation, noting that more research was needed. Christian Staudigel from German plastics institute SKZ (Horb am Neckar; www.skz.de) discussed the digital transformation in plastics processing and “Industry 4.0”, the current trend for automation and data exchange in manufacturing, also referred to as the fourth industrial revolution.

A legal overview was given by Watson Farley & Williams (London / UK; www.wfw.com). The international law firm highlighted the increasing number of recalls seen in the automotive industry. This, it said, was the result of vehicles appearing on the market quicker and with less development time. According to the company, the number of recalls had risen from 5,452 in 1995 to 4.2m in 2016, representing an average damage value of EUR 12.4m.

Akro-Plastic also presented on its ongoing product development work, including the advantages of kneading-unit free technology and ways to modify long glass fibre compounds, along with its views on melt deposition modelling (MDM), a process developed by IKV. In this method, more highly reinforced resin-based materials are used in 3D printing, which Akro-Plastic said were not only more appealing on costs than pigment- or filament-based systems, but they also made the process up to 20 times faster than filament systems because the carbon fibres have an extremely high cooling capacity.

Finally, Akro-Plastic gave examples of how PA 6 could be modified to obtain certain comparable properties to PA 6.6, which it said was scarce and expensive.