World Premiere: VacuFil® – Clean Technology for post-production and post-consumer waste

Polyester and its applications are omnipresent in our everyday lives. Whether as beverage bottles, film packaging, high-tech sports shirts or safety belts, polyester excels with its excellent mechanical properties and inexpensive production. However, the constantly rising demand requires responsible handling of global resources. For this reason, it is not only ‘virgin polyester’ generated from crude oil that is exclusively the raw material for manufacturing, so too is polyester recycled from post-production and postconsumer waste. Processing production waste also helps cut raw material, disposal and transport costs, hence increasing efficiency.

With the new VacuFil^® recycling series, Oerlikon Barmag in cooperation with its subsidiary company BBEngineering is offering a solution catering to a "clean technology" production philosophy. Decades of experience in the areas of extrusion, filtration and spinning systems have been bundled into a new, innovative core component – the vacuum filter. It unites gentle largescale filtration and controlled intrinsic-viscosity build-up for consistently outstanding melt quality. The vacuum unit – located adjacent to the filter – swiftly and reliably removes volatile contamination (spinning oil, etc.). The excellent degasification performance additionally relieves the energy-intensive predrying process.

The modular structure of the VacuFil^® range offers numerous possibilities for the process guiding system. Whether as a standalone solution with downstream granulation or as an inline variant with 3DD additive feed – customer requirements can be optimally catered for with various system configurations.