Interview of Dr. Babu Padmanabhan with Mr. Sandeep Nadkarni of Modern Plastic      Polymers during the month of Oct-07

To what extent do machinery manufacturers in India provide complete end-to-end solutions for better process productivities?

Indeed, what is true for a typical extrusion system for a blown film, profile or sheet extrusion application is also true for a compounding line. The basic equipment is the extrusion system. Apart from the extrusion system, the process plant consists of raw-material storage item, material handling system, drying equipment, pre-mixing equipment, feeding system, quenching and pelletising system, classifying or sieving and bagging/weighing system. The entire process should have instrumentation and procedures to ensure only the specified product reaches the customer. Therefore, apart from the actual hardware, the plant needs integrated quality control methods produce and sell products as per specifications.

Complete end-to-end solutions (or turnkey) are very popular in some regions in the world, such as Russia. In India, many projects are entrepreneurial, and the tasks plant engineering and application development have been generally in the purview of the entrepreneur. Machinery manufacturers have been looked at as a simple hardware supplier. With increased globalisation and the quest for world-class standards in plastics industries, this situation is steadily changing. Machinery manufacturers are seen as partners in progress and their ability to provide services beyond supply of machinery is being appreciated by the industry.

Inspiring materials development in India is our penchant.  We will do what it takes to develop applications for our customers in many areas like WPC, LFRTP, TPE, TPV, HFFR, simi-con alloys, memory alloys, bio-based materials, PEK and many more

What are the technological breakthroughs that STEER is planning to showcase at K 2007?

The most important breakthrough at STEER will display at K2007 is on the extruder processing zone (EPZ). We will showcase our special 'intake zone' elements, a low-wear and high melting capability 'melting zone' elements, high capacity 'side-feed zone' elements, and a brand new concept for 'metering zone - in short a versatile and highly functional screw configuration. We are also running a 60 L/D OMEGA 30 extruder with STEER built gravimetric extruder that will be extruding a difficult application. We will have on display an OMEGA 20 extruder, wherein the entire processing section can be stripped out in about 10 minutes.

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