Covestro develops new super-plastic with positive eco-balance
Covestro and its partners have announced the development of a high-performance thermoplastic (HPT) that could be used in various industries in the future to increase the sustainability and performance of products in areas such as aviation, automotive and health.
HPT can be processed by injection moulding and uniquely combines numerous properties.
Resistant to heat and many solvents, it is stable with high hardness and test batches of the new material are being produced.
The company says the challenge now is to enable the continuous production of the new plastic on a large scale.
This is the goal of a research project, “DreamCompoundConti”, coordinated by Covestro and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
In the current BMBF research project a continuous process will be developed to enable environmentally compatible and economical production on an industrial scale.
Covestro is working on this together with RWTH Aachen University, the Technical University Berlin, the Leipzig Plastics Centre and the aircraft manufacturer Airbus as an associated partner.
Dr. Markus Steilemann, CEO of Covestro, said: “With this new joint project, we are underlining our efforts to produce particularly high-performance plastics in a climate-friendly and simultaneously economically efficient process.”
A novel catalyst system now enables the production of thermoplastic HPT from these basic chemicals for the first time. This saves CO2 emissions and energy throughout the process because complex process steps are no longer required compared to the production of conventional high-performance thermoplastics.