Brenntag, the chemical and ingredients distributor and a developer of compounds, has joined forces with Centroplast to launch an innovative semi-finished product. Thanks to its engineering, POM CentroGlide offers sliding and non-stick properties, and is fully conformant with food safety regulations.
It moreover combines good wear and abrasion properties with low adhesive and adhesion properties, features that are fundamentally disparate and that, offered together in this way, boast significant benefits both in terms of cost and product quality.
Brenntag Polymers develops individual material solutions by applying a user-oriented approach, and in working together with Centroplast has created this tribologically optimised material on the basis of customer-specific requirements.
By preventing materials from adhering to manufacturing components, POM CentroGlide minimises the mechanical strain on various production parts. This reduces friction and wear and, as such, increases the service life and capacity of technical manufacturing systems. It also allows for work processes and downtimes to be optimised. The resulting longer intervals between cleaning and parts-replacement processes in turn significantly reduce costs for maintenance and spare parts. POM CentroGlide's non-stick features are inherent in the product's composition, meaning that there is no need for any additional non-stick coatings.
The product's food-grade conformity extends its already broad profile of features. CentroGlide is especially effective when it comes to food production processes involving pasty substances such as cake mix, as such substances often stick to the corresponding embossing rollers, moulds or cylinders.
In a trial, the new food-grade POM CentroGlide displayed a 30% lower coefficient of friction than the standard food-grade POM Copo, indicating that it has excellent sliding properties. Moreover, observing the friction of the two POM types over time showed a clear difference between them: while the coefficient of friction increased sharply and continually in the standard POM, it maintained a much better level in the CentroGlide product.
CentroGlide, therefore, offers a better coefficient of friction and responds positively to sticky substances and adhesives. A 90° peel-off test conducted on a well-known adhesive strip (on Centroplast POM plates compliant with DIN-ISO 29862:2018) clearly showed that, when POM CentroGlide is used, the adhesive strip could be detached from the POM test specimen using half the load over the same distance. This functionality is particularly useful in applications within the adhesives processing industry.
It moreover sets CentroGlide apart from PTFE as a non-stick material, especially where complex components such as injection moulding applications are concerned. The combination of POM properties (high strength, rigidity, toughness, excellent machinability, high dimensional stability, outstanding resilience, etc.) and specific CentroGlide features makes the new material an excellent alternative to the more expensive PTFE.