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

Elaborate on the various centres of excellence initiated by STEER Engineering in its bid to enhance manufacturing efficiencies.

The prerogative of delivering products that are on the cutting edge of technology has required STEER to create centres of excellence, and material centre is one of them. It focusses on continuous material development based on characterisation using measurements of fracture toughness, instrumented impact, wear and corrosion testing. Our technology centre has been another centre of excellence.
STEER has managed to pioneer progress in this field beyond what was thought possible, and after nearly 40 years, new designs and concepts have been swiftly created that will help propel the next generation of compounding equipment. Our engineering centre has been another important centre that creates gearboxes, barrel designs with optimal cooling, low inventory and laminar flow quick-change die-heads with uniform surface temperatures. Our application development centre has played a key role in developing an in-depth understanding of the process and ensuring that applications are run with optimality and efficiency. We are adding new centres of excellence, and will focus on automation & instrumentation to fully integrated and run an intelligent plant.

What was the rationale behind the establishment of STEER Information Technologies? Give us an insight into the products that STEER IT has to offer.

It is inevitable that software tools are required to take complete advantage of advanced technologies. This is reflected in our GLine6 software programme. These are a set of software tools that allow the polymer technologist and the plant manager to take complete advantage of capabilities in their compounding plant. Several important things are recorded and available at their fingertips for analysis.

First, these are design tools that offer help with complex calculations or difficult visualisations. Second, we are applying six-sigma concepts in our own work. The polymer process industry can benefit even more from applications of these concepts. The six-sigma concept accepts that any process will have variability, and the way to control the variation in the outputs is to gain knowledge of the impact of the variation in the inputs and call these as specification limits. Last of all, the GLine6 software programme will attempt to provide a simulator that provides important data on residence time, total shear, torque or power usage, and other important parameters that influence the compounding process.

In other words, it is our attempt to make the technology accessible to the industry, break the mentality of treating it as a 'black-box' and bring it to a six-sigma production capability from

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