Compounding and Recovery  

Compounding is the preparation of plastic formulations by mixing and/or blending polymers and additives in a molten state to achieve the desired characteristics. It is mainly a mixture of additives, such as antioxidants, UV stabilisers and other additives or reinforcing components, such as glass fibre. Compounding is generally performed by extrusion. The extruded filament material is cooled and cut into pellets of the required size.

At GAIKER, we use compounding technology to not only obtain polymers with functional or specific properties, but also to recover recycled materials, as more and more sectors are calling for the incorporation of recycled materials in raw materials for the manufacture of plastic end products.

Our main lines of work are:

• We add plastics in bulk using compounding techniques with additives, loads and reinforcements.
• We recover post-industrial/pre-consumer and post-consumer recycled materials as new chippings incorporating percentages of recycled material.
• We analyse the impact of the presence of recycled material on the transformation processes of thermoplastics and their final properties.
• We carry out rheological characterisation and adjustment studies in micro-rheometer, torque rheometer and rotational rheometer, whereby we can work from a very small scale in micro-compounders to a larger scale on the compounding extrusion line.