Lubrizol Corporation's performance coatings business has expanded capacity and increased manufacturing efficiencies at its solvent acrylics production facility in Sant Cugat (Barcelona), Spain.
Solvent acrylic resin technology for topcoats and primers is important for specialty packaging related to vacuum metallization, hot stamp foil and holographic printing applications, each of which plays a crucial role in packaging innovation for security, aesthetics and functional properties of substrates.
Lubrizol has automated two independent production lines for the highly specialised solvent acrylic resin in the past two years which has helped the company enhance efficiency and flexibility besides improving quality and increasing capacity.
Lubrizol process engineer Jordi Fernandez said: "These upgrades were critical to ensuring a highly reliable unit, meeting our customer's demand and quality expectations and reaching our high performance goals."
With this investment, Lubrizol acquired a new loading system for monomers and solvents, new premix and initiator tanks and their related dosing systems, new filters, two new bulk resins pipelines and a semi-automatic packaging machine.
The company has also integrated the production lines into the plant`s Distributed Control System (DCS) with the upgrade.
Lubrizol global market segment manager Rich Bradley said: "Sant Cugat is also home to Lubrizol`s Global Packaging Center of Excellence. Our labs are dedicated to linking material science to real world applications testing for the packaging industry, and our investment in plant upgrades is closely aligned with the forward-thinking work we`ve done in those labs."
A subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Lubrizol specializes in producing lubricant additives for engine oils, driveline and other transportation-related fluids, industrial lubricants, additives for gasoline and diesel fuel.
