The welding technology introduced in 2016 was modernized further. At the RAVATHERM Hungary Kft. we make efforts to use the state of art machinery for the production in addition to making sure that the manufactured products have excellent quality year after year. In 2016 we added a welding machine to the new production line which was deployed in 2013. Using a capital expenditure project having the value of 100 million HUF we established a fully automatic processing as of December last year.
XPS welding technology
As a result of this revolutionary new machine, the production of thick thermal insulating materials was simplified. The benefits of the technology include the fact that no auxiliary materials, adhesive, solvent, etc. are used, the surface of the material is melted, then the boards are compressed for joining two or more board to establish a single thermal insulating board with the help of a homogeneous welding of surfaces. The welded boards form a unit, which can be handled as a single board. The welded surface does not influence the physical prosperities of the material, the thermal insulating capacity of RAVATHERM XPS produced with the new technology, as well as its resistance to water and the compression strength parameters are the same as those products made with a single layer extruding process. .
Brief history of XPS
The closed cell polystyrene foams are usually produced with direct extrusion. The heat conducting coefficient of the thermal insulating material was made variable in the function of the thickness by introducing environment friendly foaming gases early in 2000’s. In addition to that, the upper limit of the thickness is around 20-22 cm when a single layer technology is used. The λ value was improved by 10 % on the average during the past decade thanks to the ongoing development efforts, but the dependence on the thickness still remains. In spite of the improved λ value the installation of XPS having thickness over 20-22 cm is often required in order to ensure a more efficient thermal insulation of buildings. Fists the adhering method was introduced to meet this demand, then a couple of year ago the state of art XPSwelding process was introduced which is cleaner and more environment friendly.
Qualification in case of multiple layers
The full recognition of the technology is indicated by the fact that the a European XPS product standard EN 13164 amended in 2012 contains a separate chapter that dealing with the requirements of first type testing and production control of such products. Our products have been subjected to first type testing and production control according to the standard.
Benefits of the procedure
The benefit of the welding procedure is that the thermal conductivity of RAVATHERM XPSdoes not exceed 0,035 W/mK even if the product is thick, and that it is possible to prepare products with thickness over 20 cm by welding two or more boards together. This means a nearly 10 % improvement of thermal insulation ability, and the upper limit of the production does not exist any longer for us.
Further information about our RAVATHERM XPS thermal insulation products may be found on our product pages, or contact our trading representatives.
RAVATHERM XPS, if you need thermal insulation!
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