Furniture can often face tough punishment in everyday use. That’s why Benvic saw the need to create a PVC compound with improved anti-abrasion properties by creating profiles with a soft product on a rigid one to build closets.
“This shows how versatile PVC is by mixing it with other thermoplastic resins to produce compounds with a variety of mixed features,” says Luca Spettoli, R&D Manager at Benvic. “That enabled an improvement in the mechanical characteristics.”
The innovation answered a request by a profile customer in the furniture industry, who needed a more economical alternative to profiles made of acetal resins and needed a technical solution allowing him to produce a co-extruded profile.
One challenge in developing the compound was determining the right blend. “PVC alone was not possible because of the high mechanical requirements of the profile,” Spettoli says. Another challenge: the waste material generated in the profile extruder, requiring higher downtime. “We solved those issues of course,” he adds.
Spettoli sees the new compound as part of a trend. “Co-extrusion processes are required more and more by the industry to have profiles which have a rigid and a softer part.”