Sulzer operates world-class facilities to develop technologies for polymerization reactions and devolatilization, as well as for mixing and heat transfer in highly-viscous media. We tailor our pilot plants to your requirements and demonstrate both feasibility and scale-up for industrial-scale projects.
State-of-the-art laboratory for polymer characterization, including particle size, residual volatiles, crystallization behavior, molecular weight, reaction kinetics, and rheology
Polymer pilot center
Sulzer maintains a world-class, fully equipped polymer pilot center for process development and customer testing in Winterthur, Switzerland. The pilot facilities are ideal for performing all kinds of testing ranging from bench-scale mixing experiments through to complete polymerization processes.
Installation of a customized test set-up for devolatilization of a polymer solution, comprising feed preparation, pre-heater, devolatilization and overhead system
On six floors, our experienced team of pilot technicians, R&D engineers and modeling specialists build your customized pilot plant for proof-of-principle testing and collection of scale-up data. We also operate fixed scale-down pilot plants of our EPS and PLA technology for customer demonstration and sample production.
Extrusion center with a choice of different extruders (twin-screw, single screw) and dosing/vacuum systems for compounding and testing of new technologies
Capacity of the pilot plants
The scale of our pilot plants is usually set to production capacities between 5 and 50 kg/h. Within our PLA technology portfolio, Sulzer will soon be operating its own 1 000 t/a demonstration plant for production of larger samples and scale-up tests. This demonstration plant will be on-stream as of early 2012.
