Polymers business value

Brearley etal.9 at DuPont (Wilmington, DE, USA) used in-line transmission NIR to monitor carboxyl end groups and DP in PET oligomer and pre-polymer melt streams in a new polyester process. The business value was derived from several sources. 

The number of such examples, however, is not high. In many other examples of advanced-performance materials, such as DuPont s Kevlar and Allied Signal s SPECTRA, the volume applications associated with system-for-system substitution has not yet occurred at a level necessary to pay back the development and commercialization costs already expended. High-performance ceramics is another area in which the early promise has yet to materialize. The consequences of Eckstut s life-cycle dynamics have been overcapacity and severe rationalization in high-performance carbon fiber businesses, some specialty alloy activities, and high-performance polymer composites. Thus, with critical technologies that involve advanced-performance materials, we need to better understand how to exploit their value in a commercially viable way. 

A related consideration is that incidents can affect more than one aspect of a business. Table 5-2 illustrates this point for an incident involving a 1000-lb release of cyclohexane from a decanter system at a polymer production facility. The occurrence did not harm any people and did not noticeably damage the environment although reporting of the release to regulators was required. The occurrence and the actions taken after the release caused the process to be shut down for about 9 hours and caused 3000 lb of product to be rejected. (The values in Table 5-2 are from a qualitative scale, where 10 would be very high impact and 0 would be very low or no impact.)... 

Table 9.4 shows the uses of styrene. These are dominated by polymer chemistry and involve polystyrene and its copolymers. We will study these in detail later, but the primaiy uses of polystyrene are in various molded articles such as toys, bottles, and jars, and foam for insulation and cushioning. Styrene manufacture is a large business. With a production of 11.4 billion lb and a price of 30C/lb styrene has a commercial value of approximately 3.4 billion. 

Fig. 3 Application of the Doehlert experimental design to optimize a MIP for propranolol with respect to the type of cross-linker (EDMA or TRIM) and the degree of cross-linking, (a) Three-dimensional representation of response surfaces for the percentage of bound [3H]propanolol to the molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) and the corresponding non-imprinted control polymer (NIP), (b) Contour plot of the function describing binding of [3H]propanolol to MIPs relative to the degree and the kind (bi or trifunctional) cross-linking. The values were corrected for non-specific binding to the non-imprinted control polymer. Adapted from [31] with kind permission from Springer Science + Business Media...

Polyethylene and polystyrene are two of the most commercially important and ubiquitous polymers, primarily because of their commercial value. Since the early days of polymer research there has been considerable interest to produce copolymers from ethylene (E) and styrene (S) because of both academic and business interests. Depending on the nature and type of polymerization chemistry, a variety of different molecular architectures can be produced. In addition to the different monomer distributions (random, alternating or blocky nature), there are possibilities for chain branching and tacticity in the chain microstructure. These molecular architectures have a profound influence on the melt and solid-state morphology and hence on the processability and material properties of the copolymers. 

Chemical products can be roughly segmented into basic chemicals, polymers, specialty and performance products, and agrochemicals. However, for practical purposes they can simply be classified as commodities and specialties , the latter having higher value added and distinctive key success factors. Since chemical businesses are very heterogeneous, the range from commodities to specialties is a continuous spectrum. 

Ceramic membranes, which are tougher and longer lasting than polymeric membranes, offer many advantages in ultrafiltration applications but are more than 10 times more costly than equivalent polymer membranes. Thus their use has been limited to small-scale, high-value separations that can bear this cost. One area where ceramic membranes may find a future use is clarification of chemical or refinery process streams, where their solvent resistance is needed. However, it is difficult to see a major business developing from these applications unless costs are reduced significantly. 

Blending two or more polymers offers yet another method of tailoring resins to a specific application. Because blends are only physical mixtures, the resulting polymer usually has physical and mechanical properties that lie somewhere between the values of its constiment materials. For instance, an automotive bumper made from a blend of PC resin and thermoplastic polyurethane elastomer gains rigidity from the PC resin and retains most of the flexibility and paintability of the polyurethane elastomer. For business machine housings, a blend of PC and ABS (acrylonitrile—butadiene—styrene copolymer) resins offers the enhanced performance of PC flame retar-dance and ultraviolet (UV) stability at a lower cost. 

Nanofillers are used in roughly equal volumes in both thermoplastics and thermosets at present. Thermoset nanocomposites are widely used in residential wood flooring, whereas thermoplastics applications tend to be in higher valued-added niche applications. According to Business Communications Co. Inc., thermoplastics will constitute 77% by volume of the total polymer nanocomposites market by 2008. 

Ferro has operations in 20 countries. Seventy-eight percent of its sales are either in North America or Europe, with only 19% in Asia. Net income was 19.6 M in 2003, and the number of employees was 6,800 at the end of that year. Earnings per share were down on expectations in the first half of 2004, partly because of a disappointing performance by the polymer additives unit, which could not implement sufficient price increases. Shares fell sharply in 2004 because of news that the company was investigating inappropriate accounting entries in its additives business unit. (Earnings per share in the second quarter of the year turned out to be only about 11 cents, whereas they had been expected and predicted by analysts to reach three times that value.)... 

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