Consumables
Next generation NORDEL Hydrocarbon Rubber Products from Dow Redefine Industry Standards
Wednesday 15. October 2008 - Dow Elastomers, a business unit of The Dow Chemical Company (Dow), has implemented significant upgrades to its NORDEL Hydrocarbon Rubber products to enable higher compound quality at at better economics.
“Recent changes in the NORDEL product family represent a new benchmark in quality and performance that translates into cost savings, enhanced productivity and better quality for compounders,” said Dr. Tim Clayfield, global technology leader for NORDEL at Dow. “But we are not resting here. Dow will further invest in technology and our EPDM products, and our engineers are committed to continuous improvement.”
All NORDEL products now undergo rigorous and systematic gel contamination testing to ensure that they are among the cleanest in the industry. For this, a new state-of-the-art measuring equipment is now installed at the NORDEL IP and MG plants for real-time testing and reporting of every batch of product.
New, tighter specifications for NORDEL MG products promote reduced variability in compounds to allow formulators to meet their customers requirements more precisely, at lower costs and with less waste. New polymer Mooney and total product Mooney limits provide for more constant batch-to-batch extrusion parameters, reducing both start-up time and scrap in the production process. Reducing the amount of the largest and the smallest size particles significantly improves product uniformity and surface quality of extruded profiles. This process improvement results in reduced carbon black content in NORDEL MG products, which, for customers, means more polymer in each bag.
To make quality improvements more immediately meaningful to formulators, Dow documents its industry-leading specifications and testing on the updated Certificate of Analysis (COA) that accompanies every single shipment of NORDEL products. The COA highlights tighter polymer and compound Mooney viscosity specifications, reduced carbon black content, highly consistent ethylene and ENB content, as well as gel testing results.