Mixers enhance Polyflor flooring

London - For  Polyflor - a Manchester-based manufacturer  of flooring products, including safety, sports and acoustic flooring - a key process requirement is to achieve complete mixing in the shortest possible length of pipe over a wide range of flow rates with minimal pressure drops.

In the application, too long a mixer would result in costly product losses when changing colour and too high a pressure drop would require more powerful and costly pumps, notes Chemineer. Furthermore, it said, incomplete mixing would lead to colour streaking in the finished flooring product, which would have been totally unacceptable.

To address these challenges, Polyflor installed four KMX static mixers from Chemineer on its production process, which involves mixing a minor pigment bearing stream with a viscous plastisol stream of viscosity up to 40,000 centipoise. The mixers, which are designed for laminar flow and high-low viscosity mixing applications, produced complete mixing with no streaking, minimal losses in product between colour changes and modest pipeline pressure drops.

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