Solution: Polymerdesign staff went to work to understand the requirements and possibilities, and a particularly strategic approach that was previously repeatedly dismissed was selected. This approach had been rejected for the wrong reasons, and the alignment of performance characteristics and available chemical streams made this a particularly attractive approach.

One potentially very attractive market for these products was in consumer housewares. What characteristics does the product need to work in these applications – what heat resistance is necessary? What compromises were customers making with the incumbent material and how can our material help solve their problems? Polymerdesign staff leaned in to solve these problems and more, leading to one of the most successful new polymers in industry history.

Solution: Using an existing product to solve known needs is the core of applications development. Customer needs can be solved and new revenue earned quickly.
One unique application of polymeric materials in the medical device industry is the cold-bending, or swaging, of materials to hold two items in position or to act as a closure for containers.

Polymerdesign staff analyzed the usage of the company’s polymers to understand how it could be used in similar applications, and why it was chosen over competitive offerings. A complete translation package was built around these learnings leading to new opportunities at other accounts.

Solution: A high performance polymer manufacturer began producing a high temperature semicrystalline polymer based on a favorable market assessment. Several processes and variations on the process were available to manufacture this specific material, and small changes in composition of reactants can have a significant effect on the resultant product.

Product parameters such as the thermal properties can vary significantly from target as a result of changes in chemistry, and in this case, the measured glass transition temperature varied significantly. The root cause was understood as variation in the amount of cyclic oligomer generated, and the relationship between Tg and oligomer composition was used to model effects of process variation.