On BASF’s pre K press conference 2007, on July 3 and 4 in Frankenthal, near Ludwigshafen, Germany, the company presents numerous innovations from all plastic segments.
Dr. John Feldmann, Member of the Board of Directors, responsible for BASF’s plastics as well as oil and gas business, explains the company’s consequent orientation on the basis of well-defined customer interaction models. In the plastics segment, BASF intends to focus on specialties and products with a high potential for differentiation in the market. The target is to increase the sales share of these products by 2010 from roughly 25 to 40%.
Jacques Delmoitiez, head of BASF’s Operating Division Polyurethanes, gives details on the division’s three-pillar strategy. It consists of innovative products and marketing concepts, a site concept that includes more than 30 customer-orientated system houses all over the world and the global production site concept with world scale plants in all regions. With PU basic products, PU systems, special PU elastomers (TPU) and finished components like Cellasto® BASF belongs to the worldwide market leaders. Polyurethanes are the most versatile plastics and can be found everywhere in daily life, from sports shoes and refrigerators to cable isolation, top mounts and coastal protection systems.
On K 2007 in Düsseldorf, Germany, the world’s largest plastics trade fair, BASF will present a new polyamide specialty for online coatable car body parts. The material is called Ultramid® TOP and it offers extremely high heat stability which is indispensable for body parts made of plastic. Thus a part made of Ultramid TOP can be mounted very early onto the raw car frame like e.g. a classical metallic fender and then move through the entire manufacturing process down to coating without additional effort.
There is also news about the very easy-flowing PBT Ultradur® High Speed. Backed by high market demand BASF offers now 15 different grades of this material. Brand new are the thermally conductive and the flame retardant grades (P 265). A new, low-warpage version of Ultradur High Speed-Type has been explicitly optimized for making automotive instrument panels. It is used in the dolphin system, a new method for producing soft and leather-like instrument panels in a very cost-efficient way. The companies Engel, Georg Kauffmann, P-Group and BASF have jointly developed the dolphin technique. One of the first prototype parts near to series application will be produced live at the K show in October.
Two innovative Ultrason® E grades (PESU: polyethersulfone) are available in BASF’s high performance plastics range. Both are developed for automotive headlights. Ultrason E 2010 MR black HM offers improved temperature behavior since it is colored by a new pigment system. The first PESU-Blend Ultrason E 2010 MR HP has been developed, optimizing toughness and processability considerably without harming temperature resistance.
Water injection technology (WIT) is particularly useful for injection molding of complex hollow parts. For this technology BASF has now three specific products in its range of engineering plastics: A hydrolysis-resistant PA 66, Ultramid® A3HG6 WIT, for cooling water pipes, Ultramid B3G10 SI (PA 6) and the PBT Ultradur® B 4040 G10 WIT, both for structural parts like roof rails. First applications have been realized together with the company Decoma.
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