Impressions of LanXess in Antwerp

After fifty years of production in Antwerp, Belgium, and recent commercial success for its caprolactam brands, LanXess invited me to a media day as an introduction to high-performance plastics...

A first view of glass fibre production

Gazing into a glass factory furnace is only possible for a matter of seconds - behind a polarised mask I see roaring tongues of flame, bubbling molten gloop and immense searing heat.

Jets of white hot gas fire like lightning into the cavity, maintaining the liquidity of several tonnes of glass. High pressure butane has transmogrified the silica into a sloshing juice, gently aerated to keep the pool moving.  

From towering silos, standing proud over the flat landscape of the Scheldt estuary, the granules of silica cascade through chutes into the roaring furnace.

It can never cease, with a constant temperature around 1400C, as even a slight cooling from its working heat would make irreparably distort the structure. The silica becomes molten glass, before the base of the hot gloop trickles onto the furnace bushing, where thin channels pour the liquid into a cavity below. There the trickle is accelerated to 70m/s, at once stretching into a hairlike strand and cooling rapidly.

Below the furnace is a spinning room, as humid as a rainforest, with the heat of the furnace above and the cooling spray for the glass strands. After it’s pulled through the bushing, the fibre making process seems little changed from a spinning wheel – the strands are gathered around one pivot, and quickly spun into tight yarn. The glass yarn is then pulled into a crusher, where it is chopped, bagged and sent for compounding uses at LanXess’ factories in Germany.

LanXess’ glass fibre plant, in a vast gleaming industrial area of Antwerp’s port, opened in 1976, with one furnace and direct chop making 5000 tonnes yearly. A second furnace came online in 1991. Together the ovens now provide 65,000 tonnes annually.

Shipped to LanXess compounding plants and manufacturing customers, the glass fibre is used for strengthening material for vehicles and household appliances.

High-Performance plastic production

LanXess may have only formed in the last decade, but its caprolactam facility, over the river from the Kallo glass plant, has run for fifty years. Under a policy of continuous and steady maintenance, the site is continually at the cutting edge of compounding technology and acts as a lynchpin in the expansive industrial area at the mouth of the Scheldt river, just south of the Belgian/ Dutch border. Opposite the polyamides plant is the glass fibre plant in Kallo, and twenty kilometres south in Zwijndrecht is the synthetic rubber facility of a joint venture with Saudi Aramco, Arlanxeo. The port facility is the second largest in Europe, after Rotterdam, as Antwerp became an ideal hub for materials conversion and transport in the wake of the second World War. Unlike other Northern European ports, Antwerp had emerged relatively unscathed from the war, and after Allied forces wound down military use it was clear that the Scheldt estuary would be a major port for the nascent European Community. Bayer was a pioneer in the port, and started production on April 24, 1967.

Since its spin-off from Bayer in 2004, LanXess has had some birthing pains – prolonged cost cutting and limitations in its market to the lumbering European economy. But now Michael Zobel, head of LanXess High Performance plastics, is assuring customers that the company is looking to a global vision. Dr Zobel, a graduate of the Warwick Business School and senior adviser to the company board, is orientating the Belgian sites to make high-performance materials a strong support to LanXess global operations. He said: “LanXess is a technology leader in high-tech plastics compounds. Our competence is based on continuous product and application development.”

LanXess is based in Cologne, Germany, and has divisions across the polymer materials sectors, including rubber, masterbatch, compounding and chemical intermediates. However, it describes the Antwerp glass-fibre and caprolactam plants as ‘the backbone of its plastics business.’

It may have been producing amides at the site in Lillo for half a century, but the trend for carmakers to advance lightweight construction has placed high-performance caprolactam as ‘a major future market.’ In 2014 LanXess expanded the plant to upscale production of Polyamide 6, with an annual capactity now running at 90,000 tonnes. It markets PA6 under ‘Durethan’ label, which is mainly used as a structural metal replacement in automotives and electronics.

In April, the firm announced it would spend €25 million (£22 million) over 2017 to bring about more efficiency gains in the polyamide process. So far it has invested around €300 million in the plants since taking them over from Bayer. The site gives prime access both into Europe, to LanXess’ main compounding sites around Cologne, aswell as being able to ship to its facilities in Brazil, India and China. Incidently, the ammonium sulphate byproduct from caprolactam has turned LanXess into an accidental agrichemicals giant, and the Lillo location allows it to channel the fertiliser into huge waiting tankers to be sown on the vast fields of the Pampas. With a four to one ratio of fertiliser to polyamide, LanXess has recently taken to marketing its farming products directly to wholesale after years of working with intermediaries.

Now that the plant has 420 staff, it is in running to make 220,000 tonnes of caprolactam in 2017. It estimates since firing up production 50 years ago, 6.25m tonnes have been made.

LanXess has set its sights on electric vehicles and networked communications for future applications of multi-material systems. It believes the high-performance plastics will be essential ingredients in hybrid material designs in vehicles, and great efficiency will come about through cross-linked supply chains.

www.lanxess.com