Farrel Pomini Shows Off New HQ for Continuous Compounding

Continous compounding equipment supplier Farrel Pomini now occupies a handsome new headquarters and assembly plant in Ansonia, Conn. Although the official ribbon cutting was last month, the firm’s 86 employees actually moved into the 60,000-ft² facility last September.

More than 50 visitors were given a tour of the new headquarters for Continuous Mixers and Compact Processors. It incorporates offices, machine assembly, spare-parts stocking, rotor repair and refurbishment, and a processing laboratory and customer demonstration area with a CP550 Compact Processor equipped with automated upstream materials handling and downstream pelletizing, plus the new CPeX lab-sized Compact Processor that was introduced at K 2016. There’s also an R&D department with a 3D printer for prototyping scaled-down rotors and other machine components, and an automation laboratory for designing and testing control systems for compounding process lines.

The company supplies continuous compounding systems primarily for flexible PVC, polyolefins, and TPEs. According to Paul Lloyd, business unit director, a promising new area of opportunity is biopolymers such as PLA, which require gentle handling due to their heat and shear sensitivity. The Compact Processor is well suited to PLA, says Lloyd, because its short 6:1 L/D minimizes heat history and its design separates mixing and pressurizing functions, so mixing can be optimized while still providing a shorter residence time than a twin-screw extruder. (For a photo tour of the new plant, go here.)