Sketch of Internal Mixers

High quality standards of elastomers, elastomer compounds and their final products have to be realized at the lowest possible price, because the competitive situation and the requirements have increased extremely during the past eight to ten years. This leads to the necessity of optimizing the development process from the compound design to the presentation of the new product. All activities surrounding compounding (design, mixing and extrusion) are very costly and time consuming.

E.g. “How often do you have to run a compound on a production scale machine until it suits your specifications and processing capabilities?”

As a result, more and more manufacturers have started to bring compound- development and –processing closer together and are actively looking for methods of linking laboratory- scaled test results with production experience.

To meet these requirements test methods and development tools have to be meaningful and process-related. The documentation of test results and a comparison to accepted standards and tolerance levels is a must in order to meet the requirements stipulated by different quality standards like e.g. SPC, ISO 9000 … In the complete technical report an overview of different test methods gives you an idea how torque rheometer test results can solve your production problems.

A copy of this application package note is available by quoting reference no: LR-29