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News and Updates from SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems Issue 1 | 2022
ROUNDER
UNIVERSAL EFFICIENCY
Welcome to the New SWARCO Global Glass Beads Technology Center!
PRODUCTS Reinforcements for Thermoplastics
TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION From Cullet to Beads
TREND Small Data
NETWORK Research for a Green Economy
UNIVERSAL EFFICIENCY
IN BIG STRIDES TO FULL OPERATIONS The new SWARCO Global Glass Beads Technology Center in Neufurth in the Austrian Amstetten District has made big strides towards completion. Dear readers, Small data, sustainability, collaboration and the circular economy are the common thread of this issue of the “All-Rounder”. What all of these topics have in common is that they put the focus on people. It’s not easy to find the right balance between the human aspect and industrial efficiency. And yet this feat is at the very top of the list of priorities at SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems. Ultimately, the best inventions are only meaningful if they enhance the environment. That’s why building a bridge between humanism and industrialism is essential in every way. A prosperous shared future won’t be possible without it. And we will need to do all of this while maintaining high-quality production that is also profitable. An innovative spirit, a talent for communicating and the courage to collaborate are important tools for achieving this.
With the move to the new SWARCO Global Glass Beads Technology Center, SWARCO Road Marking Systems is ushering in a new era. Thanks to state-of-the-art manufacturing processes and innovative research, it will be setting milestones to continue to fulfil its own quality criteria in the future and offer new services to customers. In addition to state-of-the-art manufacturing machinery and equipment, the new SWARCO Global Glass Beads Technology Center is home to the Center of Competence, with modern labs as well as pilot and testing facilities. With new technology and enhanced automation, SWARCO is taking another step to increase customer satisfaction. Here, energy efficiency and pollutant reduction are central to our production and development work. Furthermore, our R & D also places great emphasis on minimizing the ecological footprint of all future SWARCO products. Practically Move-In Ready The new offices are fully equipped and furnished and speak for themselves in every way. The final touches
are being added, and the departments will gradually move in by April. The large information screens set up throughout the building are already up and running, too, keeping employees up to date on internal news. The new showroom in the entrance hall showcases products and know-how of both SWARCO Road Marking Systems and SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems to guests and staff. Since the beginning of February, employees have been able to recharge their batteries in the elegant and generously equipped cafeteria. Work on the green spaces around the SWARCO Global Glass Beads Technology Center is also nearly complete. The final step is to plant the remaining shrubs in March. Status Report The glass melters, granulate treatment stations, shaft furnaces and bead-mixing facilities are already in a trial run. The move will be completed in March when the packaging line is assembled and installed. If this also goes according to schedule, production will be fully up and running as of April 2022.
Tools that SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems has been able to use time and again to the advantage of all involved. Kind regards,
Robert Buchinger Business Development SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems
The new building is inviting from every angle:
Glass bead blends are produced for a wide range of applications in the shuttle carousel of the bead-mixing facility.
From the open, bright staircase ...
... to the generously designed cafeteria.
High-grade micro glass beads are produced in the shaft furnaces.
PRODUCTS
REINFORCEMENTS FOR THERMOPLASTICS The precisely tailored addition of glass filler beads improves the mechanical properties of plastics considerably. Adding glass filler beads can increase the rigidity of plastics and reduces the material’s tendency to warp or shrink. This also has a positive impact on the scratch and abrasion resistance of a wide variety of embedding materials. Since glass by itself has no, or only a very minor, affinity towards plastic, proper silanization is of the utmost importance. Silanization is the coating of the glass beads’ surface to enhance their adhesion capacity. Only the right method allows for a successful bond between the glass filler beads and the matrix material used.
Small data refers to small, manageable volumes of data that can be used specifically to solve a particular problem. The most obvious difference between small data and big data is that small data focuses on the person behind the data. Small data is less about statistics and probability and more about detailed information bundled together in packages. This helps answer specific questions and provides a faster and clearer pathway to the objective in explicit scenarios. Small quantities of data are more than enough in these situations because small data is so comprehensible that it can be identified as part of a direct dialogue with potential customers. Customers can leave their data on a website or in an online shop, for example, and even enter their data themselves.
The Danish author and marketing expert Martin Lindstrom played a major role in shaping the concept of small data with his book Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends. In it, he tells how he spent 300 nights a year travelling, observing people in their homes and asking them questions. These are exactly the kind of personal inputs that create small data. Source: Martin Lindstrom, Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
SEM image of a fracture area in a plastic reinforced with glass filler beads.
TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
FROM CULLET TO BEADS
SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems turns high-grade flat glass into a real all-rounder.
SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems has the necessary know-how to transform glass cuttings and scraps into high-grade glass beads for industrial applications.
Small Data
Small data attempts to sort and prioritize data sets in ways that improve their quality, which also makes the information they contain more precise. Comprehensibility and customer friendliness are the guiding principles of small data.
Depending on the intended application, grain size distribution within the plastic to be reinforced can influence the properties of the end product, too. Both undersized and oversized grains lead to different results in specific cases. For these reasons, grain size distribution, silanization properties and the fill level of the glass filler beads all depend on each other and require a fine balance. Precisely analyzing these ratios and their effects makes it possible to optimize products in a targeted manner and ultimately to develop them further over the long term.
TREND
Glass filler beads and blasting beads are used to modify materials or treat surfaces in many industrial areas. Ever more frequently, micro glass beads with a diameter ranging from 0.001 to 1.4 millimetres are used for these purposes. A series of processing steps is needed to make this possible.
Optimal Recycling First, flat glass cullet is crushed in jaw crushers and hammer mills to obtain glass granulate. Subsequently, this fine material is carefully pre-sieved in order to decide on the later grain sizes of the finished micro glass beads. The resulting material is then melted in a shaft furnace. Thanks to the surface tension of the melted glass, it takes the ideal desired shape – a sphere – automatically during this process. At SWARCO, about five million round micro glass beads are produced from glass fragments per second using this method.
High-grade flat glass serves as the basis for the production of micro glass beads.
Micro glass beads take shape in the shaft furnace.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
OUR MISSION
We leverage the universal benefits of glass beads for your special industry applications, in energy-efficient ways. OUR VISION
Industrial glass beads by SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems – the world’s preferred choice in all niches OUR VALUES
Efficiency, Diversity, Intelligence
NETWORK
RESEARCH FOR A GREEN ECONOMY Scientists collaborate with companies at the new CDL-AgePol lab at the Johannes Kepler University. At the Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) in Austria, scientists are working together with innovative companies on new methods for studying the long-term durability of polymeric materials under complex stress conditions. One of these companies is SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems. Twenty-first century technologies need durable and cost-effective products made from plastic, steel and glass. CDL-AgePol is therefore developing new methods for analyzing the ageing processes on the molecular level that occur at interfaces between plastic, metal and glass. It’s a sophisticated process, as tests are conducted on a micrometre and nanometre scale. This is significant for many industrial processes and products, and as one would expect with such important research, there has been considerable interest from company partners. The research is also highly relevant to renewable energy
and mobility technology fields. “Plastics have become a permanent part of our lives. They are a pivotal piece in the transformation towards a sustainable and environmentally sound circular economy which is based on carbon and solar energy. This CD lab fits into this approach. Greater durability and precise predictions of expected service life enable resource-efficient industrial manufacturing processes and products. The new lab is therefore making an important contribution to transformative change,” says JKU Rector Meinhard Lukas. Christian Doppler Laboratory CDL-AgePol (Christian Doppler Laboratory for Superimposed Mechanical-Environmental Ageing of Polymeric Hybrid Laminates), headed by Prof. Gernot Wallner, has been awarded 3.5 million euros in funding and will run through August 2027. It is partially funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs (BMDW).
OUR MOTTO
Universal Efficiency
Plastics experts from JKU Linz work together with companies and scientists from around the world (such as Stanford University in the United States) at the new CDL-AgePol.
WORKING TOGETHER TO REACH THE GOAL Open research, in which researchers cooperate with companies, is the best way to achieve an efficient circular economy in the future.
Imprint: Responsible for content: SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems, Wipark, 14. Straße 11, 3363 Neufurth, Austria, www.swarco.com/ais Idea, design and artwork: Kommhaus, www.kommhaus.com Photos: SWARCO Advanced Industry Systems, SWARCO Road Marking Systems, www.shutterstock.com/M.Style, Johannes Kepler Universität | English translation: Irina Pálffy-Daun-Seiler | Printed by Druckwerkstatt Handels GmbH | Subject to change without notice. No liability for errors or misprints. We are deeply committed to gender equality. For the sake of brevity, only one gender may be used on occasion. However, this does not imply any discrimination against the other gender. If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter, please send an e-mail to ais@swarco.com
Collaboration between industry and the scientific community is absolutely essential if we are to meet the major challenges of the future. Here, sustainability, climate protection and the circular economy are the main themes.
Networking is a deciding factor in successfully implementing this potential. Plastics researchers and the plastics industry need to work more closely together. In the future, cooperation between industry and research institutions will play a key role.
In the future, developments in the field of polymeric materials will play a pivotal role in reaching the global Sustainable Development Goals. These developments will also be important for initiatives in the coming years that will bring us closer to a fully circular economy. They have considerable innovation potential for a wide range of energy efficiency technologies and are crucial in the creation of new energy technologies.
The same is true for transitioning plastics into a fully circular economy. Approaches that are coordinated between industry and the scientific community will make it possible to use chemical recycling or energy recovery methods to fully recycle or recover waste that would otherwise be unrecyclable.
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