Stefan Hoyer and his colleagues developed a completely new processing technology for their recycling solution: single-stage direct extrusion. The special thing about this is the combination of the compounding and profile extrusion, i.e. the blending of the original materials and the shaping of them. “We eliminate one stage in the process, reduce energy consumption and protect the material from thermal damage”, says Stefan Hoyer. It is said that endlessly long, high-quality mats for wear protection and soundproofing can be produced in this way. Hoyer and his colleagues are so confident about the quality and promise of their research that they are already thinking about starting series production: “At the moment we are still in the market launch phase, but we are already co-operating with a company from the region.”
In line with the motto that one solution is not a solution, the scientists from Chemnitz adopted a second approach too. In this context, Stefan Hoyer and his colleagues focussed on improvement of the technology, which is now in operation on an international scale: the goal was to optimise the recycling of technical elastomers, says Stefan Hoyer. Let us take a look at the details:
Technical elastomers are rubber materials that are used for many different applications, e.g. in the form of sealing rings. In most cases, production of them leads to a large amount of waste, which is expensive to dispose of. Their method aims to process these residual materials in such a way that they can be fed back into the manufacturing process very easily, Hoyer explains. The recycled material, which consists of a single substance in most cases, is simply mixed in with the virgin materials again and is processed with them.