Testimonials - Sheet Extrusion

Steve R. is the President of a small specialty sheet extruder located in the upper mid-west. Here's what he has to say about the use of SuperNova HT at his company:

We have one extruder at present... a 5 inch machine feeding a 54 inch sheet die. We run it 24/7 making two products: a dark green high-heat polystyrene sheet and a natural high molecular weight PE sheet.

Our big problem was in going from the PE to the styrene, which we have to do once a month. The PE will push out the styrene just fine but going the other way, sometimes it would take us 7 or 8 hours before we could get clean styrene sheet. And we'd make a bunch of scrap that we had to grind up and sell for about ten cents a pound.

Now we use the SuperNova HT for that transition. It takes us about 40 pounds of purging material and we spend a little over an hour on it. We flush through about 150 pounds of natural styrene and go up on the die heats about 100 degrees - that takes about a half hour. Then we let the purge work for about a half hour and when we bring in the styrene production material we're making good sheet in a few minutes.

I was a little worried about whether the purge material would have a problem going through our melt pump, but it's no issue at all.

Compared to where we were before, we get close to a shift back and the savings on scrap way more than covers the cost of the SuperNova material. We're glad to have it in our toolbox.