The Lubrizol Corporation's Performance Coatings business has completed a significant project to expand capacity and increase manufacturing efficiencies at its solvent acrylics production facility in Sant Cugat (Barcelona), Spain.
Solvent acrylic resin technology for topcoats and primers is critical to the success of specialty packaging requirements related to vacuum metallization, hot stamp foil and holographic printing applications. Each of these technologies is playing an increasing role in packaging innovation for security, aesthetics and functional properties of substrates.
Over the past two years, Lubrizol made significant investments to automate two independent production lines for the highly specialized solvent acrylic resin. This automation helped achieve the goal of creating efficiency and flexibility while also improving quality and increasing capacity. This investment included 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.
This upgrade also allowed for the integration of these production lines into the plant's Distributed Control System (DCS). "These upgrades were critical to ensuring a highly reliable unit, meeting our customers demand and quality expectations and reaching our high performance goals," noted Jordi Fernandez, Lubrizol process engineer.
The investment in plant upgrades increases Lubrizol's value by strengthening our ability to be a global solution provider with the technologies and capacities that can help drive our customers' growth and overall success.
