BARBERTON, Ohio—Akron Rubber Development Laboratory Inc. has moved its mixing and compounding services to the company's Barberton campus, adding an injection molding and extrusion line in the process for sample preparation and prototyping.
The move is part of the company's overall efforts to gather its services under one roof. Based on Gilchrist Road in Akron, the company moved its mixing and compounding services to Barberton from a Kenmore Boulevard location.
With its ability to custom mix rubber compounds and review formulas, ARDL is able to mimic customer manufacturing processes to help them trouble shoot their compounds. ARDL also maintains more than 30,000 rubber compound recipes in its library.
ARDL's labs can conduct calendering, compound and process development, mixing, curing, molding, processability testing and many other services with its equipment, which includes an instrumented Banbury lab mixer, two MonTech MDR and ODR rheometers, a MonTech Mooney viscometer, a 4-roll inverted-L calender "capable of skim coating fabric and calendering rubber or plastic sheets," compression molding presses, a transfer molding press, hand press, curing ovens, freezers, steam cure autoclaves, rubber cutter and chemical inventory.
With the new extrusion line, ARDL's capabilities increase with a Davis-Standard L.L.C. 2-inch extruder with LCM curing, microwave curing and hot air curing equipment.
"These additional capabilities provide laboratory scale extrusion services to complement molding and processability testing," ARDL said.
ARDL also added a new Rep/Tung Yu vertical injection molding machine "to mimic processing and molding performed at client facilities."
The company also can conduct low-volume runs of manufactured products.