More business and novel jobs

Specialist rigid polyurethane machinery makers have found the past couple of years a lively period for business and product innovation. Simon Robinson reports.

Specialist polyurethane machinery makers have come through the coronavirus pandemic in an upbeat mood as the construction industry continues growing, along with demand for cold chain equipment and domestic refrigeration.

Saip’s commercial director Luca Ceresa said: ‘We have recently installed three separate lines for insulated metal panels, one with a PIR core, and the others with mineral wool in North America. And we have an order for another line from the same customer to be delivered later this year.’

Faster, faster!

Shane Wootton, a director of CTM, Hennecke’s agent in the UK, explained how his company’s Italian subsidiary Hennecke OMS has been innovating between 2020 and 2021. ‘Hennecke OMS has been developing lines that produce less scrap and run fast,’ he said. ‘The Italians have been pushing the barrier on production line speeds. These are now upwards of 60m/min so the downstream handling equipment has to be sophisticated.’

Reducing waste is important as well, Wootton explained. ‘The crosscut saws used to cut panels to length can generate a lot of dust,’ he said. ‘Now by using a new technology blade, this has been reduced. Some of the dust can be re-incorporated into the panels, and this reduces the overall amount of dust to be dealt with through the waste system.’

Rigid polyurethane foam is sometimes used for its structural strength, as well as its insulation properties. Wootton outlined an unusual application that survived the uncertainty that coronavirus caused in global industrial goods markets, making insulated aeroplane hangar doors.

‘This was negotiated for five years and, it looked likely that coronavirus was going to kill it,’ he said. ‘But the client decided to go ahead with the contract for us to supply a plant to produce metal faced insulated aircraft hangar doors. These are huge. The doors are as wide as the wingspan of the plane.’

He said that CTM supplied a laydown system that overcame some of the problems with the earlier production process. It involved injecting PU into the panel at a set point, Wootton said. ‘The foam distribution was poor in the door, and there were issues with air trapped against steel,’ he said. This could lead to delamination in hot countries, and they solved the problem by using a high-pressure machine. ‘It traverses left to right on the door while we’re translating the door into the press. Then we close the press, and reattach the upper skin before the foam comes over the top.’

For CTM though, big contracts like this have been the exception, rather than the rule. ‘Turnover has come from retrofitting and reconditioning old machinery,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen a couple of customers who, historically, would have bought new machinery, choose to avoid buying it, and found another way around their problem.’ This could be by retrofitting a control system to existing plant, he said.

Unusual jobs

Saip’s Ceresa said that, like CTM’s hangar door machine, his company had won a similarly rare contract: to supply machinery to make special panels for an LNG tanker project. ‘In China, we recently delivered a special line for flexible facing boards for the LNG industry,’ he said. ‘The line has a 2.2m wide special double belt. This is a new concept, and is out of the standard. The panels are fibreglass reinforced and thicker than usual. They have to be 2.2m wide because that is the standard width for LNG carriers. Depending on the situation, we have plans to install this line by the end of 2021 or start of 2022.’

Ceresa added that there has been greater innovation in more normal cold-chain applications. ‘In Europe, commercial refrigeration is becoming more stringent in terms of insulation values, more similar to domestic refrigerators,’ he said. ‘On both sides of the Atlantic, coronavirus has created demand for cabinets with thicker insulation to keep contents, that is vaccines, at very low temperatures. We have created a family of dedicated fixtures and moulds with automatic changeover to reduce cycle times.’

He said that the company has recently been successful in commercial refrigeration. ‘We have won a big contract in the US to make a turnkey line to insulate cabinets for ice cooling machines,’ he said. ‘We have also been awarded business in Portugal from a multinational company that makes industrial refrigeration cabinets, and is active in Spain and the UK.’

Away from these areas, Saip has also developed a polyurethane machinery system, Repur, which allows dust from cutting rigid PU, chipboard and MDF to be converted into high density panels that can be used in several different applications. This is achieved using a mechanical and chemical process that, Ceresa said, has no environmental impact

Separately, the company’s Cepeda joint venture with Dow has produced a process monitoring system called Butterfly. ‘This is a smart approach to optimisation of the production process,’ Ceresa said. Designed on rigid production machinery, it gathers and analyses production data to make production more efficient and plant more economic.