The INEOS Styrenics European Technology Centre, located in Breda, The Netherlands, is a purpose-built research and development, and product testing facility. It represents an investment of over Euro 5 million in support to our customers to improve their processes, and to develop and test new applications.

We also conduct Research and Development with the R&T Centre at Wingles.

Our Research and Technology team is working to ensure we translate our customers’ requirements into industry–leading products and service for today and tomorrow. Our Technical Service experts are ready to help our customers select the appropriate material and optimise conversion processes. They provide information and advice on quality assurance, comparative performance of material and address health, safety and environmental concerns.

A further key part of the Centre's work is to provide technological support to the production process and quality improvement initiatives at our polystyrene and expandable polystyrene manufacturing plants. This work is part of our drive to deliver consistently high product quality.

The laboratory (1)

Our laboratory testing facilities provide analytical support and testing facilities.  The laboratory is equipped with analytical equipment like gas chromatography and High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC).  There is also a complete range of testing capabilities available like Falling Dart, Tensile, flex, impact testing and other testing equipment.

The Reactor room (2)

The Centre has 10 bench scale reactors each with 5 or 10 litre capacity, which are used to reproduce commercial production conditions to enable the manufacture of test batches of different product formulae safely.

The Machine Hall (3)

Application testing is carried out using a range of equipment of the type typically used by EPS, SPS and HPS converters. There are both continuous and batch pre-foaming machines. A number of EPS shape and block moulding machines are used to produce EPS parts. A 30 mm diameter co-rotating twin-screw extruder is used for extruder operations and a Battenfeld injection moulding machine can provide test bars of compact polystyrene according to ISO standards for mechanical testing.

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