May 25, 2007 – Using its proprietary Hostalen Advanced Cascade Process (ACP), Basell has launched a new high density polyethylene (HDPE) resin that offers converters of bottles for household chemicals and daily care products an outstanding combination of stiffness and environmental stress-cracking resistance (ESCR).

Higher level of stress-crack resistance and stiffness

Hostalen ACP 6031D, the new resin, can enable customers to obtain an ESCR of up to 10 percent higher than a typical HDPE grade with the same density based on Basell tests, said Mike Freudenstein, Basell’s product manager for HDPE grades. “The ACP process modifies the polymer structure to reach a higher level of stress-crack resistance and stiffness”, he said. The high level of interaction between ESCR and stiffness achieves new opportunities in extrusion blow moulding. Basell tests have also demonstrated that Hostalen ACP 6031D can help customers reduce the wall thickness of their products, according to Alexander Woerz, Basell’s application development manager.  “The high stiffness is a key to reduced weight, reduced material consumption and reduced cycle times, all of which are essential to competitiveness and value for processors”, he explains.

Reduced Panelling

Aside from these features the new HDPE grade offers to customers better barrier properties. The new grade customers can reduce the so-called ‘panelling’ of their devices. “This is of utmost significance for manufacturers as bottles made out of conventional materials run the risk to warp in the course of time cause of chemicals weakening the polymer structure. Hostalen ACP 6031D based bottles stay stable due to the highly crystalline structure of the resin, which reduces the permeability of the material”, says Wörz. Basell launched the new Hostalen ACP as an improvement to existent bottle grades. “With the new grade we address an expected market growth in the household applications sector”, explains Freudenstein.

The new HDPE resin is currently manufactured in Europe and is available for export. By using a cascade reactor technology, multi-modal resins produced using the Hostalen ACP process offer a combination and flexibility in terms of product properties that are not achievable with conventional HDPE grades that are unimodal -or bimodal-based.

Basell is the global leader in polyolefins technology, production and marketing. It is the largest producer of polypropylene and advanced polyolefin products; a leading supplier of polyethylene and catalysts, and the industry leader in licensing polypropylene and polyethylene processes, including providing technical services for its proprietary technologies. Basell, together with its joint ventures, has manufacturing facilities in 19 countries and sells products in more than 120 countries. Additional information about Basell is available at www.basell.com.

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For more information contact Waldemar Oldenburger, Basell Corporate Communications, at +49 69 305 854 59 or waldemar.oldenburger@basell.com or please visit our newsroom on www.basell.com/content/newsroom