Plastics production - Gear pumps for conveying plastic melts

Gear pumps for plastic manufacturing

The plastics industry is one of the motors of the economy. Whether packaging for food or components for the automobile industry, plastic is omnipresent today. New formulas increase the capacity and expand the areas of application for this material.


The variety of materials and manufacturing processes grows continually and present component suppliers with new requirements. In nearly any polymer production process, gear pumps are used to move the polymer in the plants and to transport it to the individual process stages. The viscous melts present very special requirements for pumps. Due to viscosity and process parameters, high-capacity, powerful and robust pumps are used to transport polymer melts.

WITTE gear pumps are used, for example, in procedures to produce thermoplastic elastomers such as TPE or TPU, polyamide or polyester.


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Case Study

For a customer from the automotive supply sector, we developed a gear pump to produce polycarbonate. The process involves the phosgene-free production of polycarbonate. This process was first implemented in 2012 and scaled up to a significantly higher output 7 years later. The polycarbonate is manufactured for use in the automotive industry to produce, among other things, headlamp lenses. Highest purity and quality have absolute priority for this product.

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In the production of raw materials for the manufacture of plastics, large pumps are used for emptying melting reactors and containers. ­


These so-called discharge pumps suck the plastic melt out of the melting reactor which is under vacuum. The vacuum is necessary to extract the solvents that make the raw mass flowable from it. Plastics manufacturers require many different pumps to produce the raw masses, which are adapted to the corresponding plastics and process stages of the plant.

Among other things, suppliers and manufacturers use gear pumps for dosing additives, emptying reactors, or building up pressure. Large pumps that convey several 1000 tons of melt or raw material per day are designed and assembled at WITTE exclusively at the Tornesch site.