A new plasticizing system for compounds with high levels of glass fibre reinforcement provides wear-resistance, high throughput, and gentle mixing, enabling injection moulders to meet the requirements of metal-replacement and other high-strength applications while enhancing productivity and part quality. The Xaloy High Glass Filled Polymer System will be introduced by Nordson Corporation at Fakuma 2017 and is designed for injection moulding a wide range of resins with filler content from 10 to 60%. Applications include automotive, marine, electronic, and other parts that require very high levels of strength and stiffness.

Components in the Xaloy package system include:

- Xaloy Pulsar I Mixing Screw, whose wave-style root geometry enhances distributive and dispersive mixing, providing continually varying, localized high- and low-pressure areas that yield complete melt homogenization with low shear; the resulting gentle mixing minimizes fibre breakage and thus maximizes part strength;

- Xaloy X-8000 Screw Encapsulation, a nickel-based alloy with high tungsten carbide content that provides twice the abrasive and corrosion wear life than standard high-velocity oxy-fuel (HVOF)-applied coatings; Nordson uses HVOF technology to apply the coating to the entire screw geometry, then fuses the alloy to the parent metal of the screw, forming a metallurgical bond; in addition, the Xaloy X-8000 encapsulation is double the thickness of standard HVOF-applied coatings;

- Xaloy X-800 Barrel Inlay, a liner combining a nickel- based alloy with tungsten carbide that provides a high degree of abrasion and corrosion resistance and functions compatibly with the Xaloy X-8000 screw encapsulation;

- application-specific valve, designed to accommodate the viscosity and flow properties of highly filled compounds.

“Wear-resistance is only one of the requirements for successfully processing the highly filled compounds called for in metal-replacement and other high-performance applications”, said Mark Colella, global product manager for Nordson’s Xaloy brand. “Our new Xaloy plasticizing system enables moulders to overcome the challenges to productivity and part quality posed by today’s increasingly higher loadings of glass fibre reinforcement”.