DSM Elastomers relaunches as innovation-focussed company

By David Shaw, ERJ staff

Sittard, Netherlands -- DSM Elastomers is on a charm offensive with customers and journalists. The aim is to re-launch itself as an innovation-focussed company, offering to work with customers to help deliver added value and improved profitability.

The company's senior management team is in the middle of a two-day event designed to present a new face to the industry. The company is using the event to launch its new ACE - Advanced Catalyst technology. But also to declare that the restructuring of the company is complete, and DSM Elastomers remains committed to EPDM terpolymers.

ACE is a new catalyst technology, claimed as a second-generation system that can out-perform metallocene systems. The chemistry focusses around the third monomer in the ethylene-propylene -diene system, which is normally ethylene norbornene, or ENB.

ACE allows DSM Elastomers to design molecules along a spectrum from highly branched structures to minimal branching. This can deliver products with characteristics designed to deliver ideal combinations of rheology and performance in service, said the company. ACE materials are all thermoset elastomers, said the company. The company said this ability to control the branching allows DSM to make EPDM grades that offer extremely efficient peroxide, cure, permitting either less peroxide to be used, or more filler.

The first products of the ACE grades are being made in small-scale reactors, and will not go into live production until the first quarter of 2008, said the company.

Over the last five years the company has closed old plants and opened a large new unit in Geleen, near the company's headquarters in Sittard. In addition, it has reduced its range of products from around 125 different grade- and presentation- options, to just 25. These two moves, said the company, are designed to reduce its own costs, in order to remain competitive.