Machinery News

Wood composites given a boost
Reifenhäuser says its latest direct extrusion line BiTrudex for wood composites (WPC) allows for 25-30% reduction in investment costs while improving performance.

Reifenhäuser held an open house in Troisdorf in December where more than 150 visitors were able to witness the company’s line technology. Both a WPC compound line and a WPC direct extrusion line were demonstrated, with the latter featuring a four times higher speed than achieved the year before for the same profile.

With a market growth of 15%, WPC is able to be produced using direct extrusion, underwater pelletising, die-face pelletising and compound extrusion. A combination of wood as a sustainable material and modern plastics, WPCs are becoming more and more important in the growing environmentally conscious world.

Other features of the new BiTrudex are energy savings of 30%; reduction of dust due to an additional suction unit; increased flexibility and optimised process control thanks to an additional gravimetric component throughput measurement; easier handling and additional extruder size for the production of smaller WPC profiles.

The German company also offers an extruder that guarantees over 20,000 operating hours for screws and barrels as wear parts as well as financing to purchase its equipment.

Reifenhäuser also offers a return-on-investment analysis in addition to a production for sales testing purposes. That means that customers can have their product produced with their own raw materials and then make their purchase decision depending on the production result. Reifenhäuser is also able to develop individual recipes, if this should be necessary, to obtain optimum results in terms of product quality and line speed. It also has its own tool making shop that can develop specific WPC profile die-heads.