Seattle, WA, USA -- (Jobwerx) -- Solvay Solexis announced today that it has started supplying a new grade of Tecnoflon® perfluoroelastomers created through its ground-breaking polymerization technology called “Branching & Pseudoliving” - which can generate products with properties that cannot be obtained by conventional manufacturing techniques. These high-value added materials with an extensive R&D content belong to the top of the range of polymer products and are designed for sealing solutions in extreme environments. Their outstanding performance places them in the same pricing category as certain pharmaceutical products or precious metals.

Compared with existing materials used to build fluid handling systems in critical processes, the new Tecnoflon® PFR 45HT perfluoroelastomer offers enhanced high temperature sealing, improved steam resistance, and excellent overall chemical resistance. This exceptional reliability is of paramount importance in chemical and processing industry manufacturing systems, which operate under extreme conditions - and where any imperfection in sealing may cause severe damage. Furthermore, manufacturing processes using these new materials can be simplified and still produce high-performance components, consequently allowing processors to improve the environmental reliability of their systems and to reduce shut down times as well as maintenance costs.

The term polymer covers a large, diverse group of molecules, including substances ranging from proteins to high-performance materials. The polymers manufactured by the Solvay Group include plastics, elastomers and fluids. A polymer is a long chain of atoms, formed through the repetition an identical molecule - called monomer. This repetition occurs during polymerization, in which many monomer molecules link to each other. Until Solvay Solexis developed its new Branching & Pseudoliving polymerization technology, the properties of a polymer (such as flexibility, or resistance) were essentially determined by the type of monomer used in the polymerization process.

Perfluoroelastomers such as the ones in Solvay Solexis’ Tecnoflon® range are a special class of fluorinated polymers which have the ability to resume their original shape when a deforming force is removed. They are designed for demanding sealing applications in aggressive chemical and high heat environments – in the car racing, aerospace, pharmaceutical, semiconductor or chemical and processing sectors among others.

The new Tecnoflon® PFR 45HT perfluoroelastomer was developed as a tailor-made solution for specific, demanding applications. The Branching & Pseudoliving technology allows the creation of such complex, controlled macromolecular structures. While regular polymerization consists of the stepwise reproduction of a basic monomer molecule to create a simple linear structure, Branching & Pseudoliving is a molecular construction process that can be compared to the ‘growth’ of cells in living organisms.

Branching & Pseudoliving is a Solvay Solexis proprietary polymerization technology which allows the preparation of fluoropolymers with controlled macromolecular structure, leading to products with properties not obtainable by conventional techniques. Branching & Pseudoliving takes advantage of the fact that in the presence of a special iodine compound, polymerization behaves as a living polymerization, with a continuous stepwise growth of the polymer molecules. Moreover, the reaction with a fluorinated diolefin leads to a controlled branching. The combination of these two concepts - pseudo-living and controlled branching – allowed Solvay Solexis to generate the first fluoropolymers whose morphology can be adjusted to obtain complex molecular architectures.

Solvay Solexis’ Branching & Pseudoliving materials: Thanks to their controlled morphology, besides better mechanical and sealing properties, the new polymers created through Branching & Pseudoliving can also be more easily processed into molded items used mainly for sealing applications in aggressive environments, for instance in the car racing, aerospace and chemical industries. The polymer easily fills elaborate molds and thus complex items can be molded using automatic techniques such as injection molding - which cannot be used with conventional peroxide curable fluoroelastomers. In addition, due to the improved structure of the material, processing can be simplified and processing times considerably reduced – and still generate components with the required performance.

Solvay Solexis, an international leader in the fluorinated materials market, is part of the Strategic Business Unit Specialty Polymers of the Solvay group. It employs approximately 2,000 people and operates worldwide through seven companies in Italy, France, Japan, Brazil, China, Korea and the United States. Solvay Solexis is headquartered in Bollate (Milano, Italy), which also hosts its main R&D facility, with 300 researchers.

Solvay is an international chemical and pharmaceutical group with headquarters in Brussels. It employs some 30,000 people in 50 countries. In 2004 its consolidated sales amounted to EUR 7.9 billion, generated by its three activity sectors: Chemicals, Plastics and Pharmaceuticals. Solvay is listed on the Euronext 100 index of top European companies.

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