Page 54 - Plastics News April 2023

TECHNOLOGY

accumulators, which can be extreme- rial. The line tested consisted of three more areas to clean, a larger combi-
ly difficult to purge. Ultra Purge™ extruders – one using virgin polyethyl- nation of material properties to con-
3615 is a chemical purging compound ene and two using recycled polyethyl- tend with, and more components that
that typically requires less product to ene, which was leaving a lot of residue may be difficult to reach.
be effective and is less abrasive on and various color contaminants inside Using Ultra Purge™ 3615 was the so-
equipment. the screw and die. Even subsequent lution. From the start of the first use, a

Ultra Purge™ 3615 in the real manual cleaning wasn’t sufficiently fin- large amount of color residue was ex-
world ishing the job. tracted – after just five minutes, color
This was no surprise to our experts. particles were visibly extracted from
One Chem-Trend customer running a
multilayer extrusion line recently saw Multilayer extrusion lines are well the equipment, successfully complet-
great success by implementing Ultra known to add complexity to the ing the purge.
Purge™ 3615 to purge recycled mate- cleaning process. More layers mean

How Gneuss retrofitting is helping the circular economy

duced on this line for high value cast
and blown film applications. Llorens´
customers can both fulfil the legal re-
quirement for recycling content and
manufacture high quality film.

The company claims that the Gneuss
Rotary Melt Filtration Systems can
handle high melt pressures and heav-
ily contaminated materials with highly
variable contamination loads. At the
same time, they with a high level of
automation. Exchange of the filter
elements takes place under normal
he transformation to a circular Llorens has a relatively new extrusion
Teconomy is being driven by the line for reprocessing post-industrial production conditions, without dis-
turbances in the process. In addi-
European Commission´s Europe waste film from LDPE and LLDPE, tion to this the company claims that
2020 strategy for growth. The in- however the filtration fineness which thanks to the automatic, segmental
crease in recycling targets aims to could be achieved with the original high pressure self-cleaning system,
encourage European wide industrial equipment Melt Filtration was unable the RSFgenius Melt Filtration Systems
symbioses which have set themselves to remove the critical contaminants offers long intervals between filter
the target of operating holistically and from the polymer. element changes with a minimum of
with more efficient use of resources.
Llorens decided to add an RSFgenius back flushing material.
One of these companies is the Spanish Melt Filtration System from Gneuss as
company, Llorens GMR in Barcelona. a fine filter in order to remove con- In recent years, throughout Europe
Llorens offers its customer an exten- taminants down to 56 to 100 µm. (and worldwide) a large number
sive service, from collection, prepara- The Gneuss RSFgenius achieves this of LDPE / LLDPE recycling extru-
tion to the reuse of industrial waste. at a constant melt pressure, thereby sion lines have been retrofitted with
Llorens has several modern repro- ensuring that gels and black specks Gneuss Melt Filtration Systems for
cessing and recycling lines. are reliably removed. As a result, Llo- fine filtration.
rens is able to use the material pro-

54 PLASTICS NEWS April 2023