World's largest and most versatile flexshuttle plant inaugurated
Significant "time-to-market" customer advantage
BYK doubles capacity in application technology
Around 15 million euros investment in Wesel
BYK, one of the world's leading specialty chemicals manufacturers, is entering a new era of application technology with a globally unique digital laboratory, taking the range of customised additive solutions for its customers into a new dimension.
"The fully automated High Throughput Screening (HTS) system performs serial tests at BYK with impressive speed and efficiency. 220 samples are produced and tested in 24 hours at high throughput. This corresponds to up to 80,000 samples per year," explains Dr Jörg Hinnerwisch, BYK CTO.
A fully digitalised process allows a reduction in time for serial tests from the previously usual months to just a few days. The time saved in this way frees up the same amount of time for the creation of new differentiating customer solutions and doubles BYK's capacity in application technology.
"The plant works like a giant filter in this respect. With this plant, we can determine exactly which of a large number of tested products are the two or three that offer the customer the greatest benefit," says Manfred Knospe, HTS project manager at BYK.
The state-of-the-art plant is complex. 32 modules with 27 different functionalities are ready to test BYK additives in paints, plastics and adhesives. The modules are connected to each other via a rail system; shuttles bring individualised samples from one module to the next.
The testing of liquid samples with regard to pH value, foam or particle size distribution is part of this unique HTS system. Two rheology measuring devices also assess the flow behaviour.
Depending on the application, the samples are then applied by pouring, drawing or spraying and cured by UV radiation, oven or air drying. Finally, a fully automatic property test is carried out for gloss, flow or colour.
HTS pH module
"With this investment in the future, we are on the one hand again creating more creative space for our highly qualified researchers who are working on the additive solutions of tomorrow. On the other hand, thanks to the enormous speed of our HTS plant, we are greatly shortening our customers' time-to-market and thus giving them an important competitive advantage," says Dr. Tammo Boinowitz, BYK business unit manager.
www.byk.com
