Process Technology

Process Technology develops new processes and improvements to existing ones, keeping Arkema Inc.'s manufacturing facilities on the cutting edge of technology. The goal of Process Technology is to ensure that our plants operate efficiently, safely and in compliance with environmental standards.

Process Technology is active in six main areas:

• New Product, Scale Up and Commercialization: Process Technology works closely with Research and the Pilot Plant to successfully take a research concept and convert it into a manufacturing process. Through this process, Process Technology is also active in helping produce customer samples and small-scale production. As a result, several new Kynar® products were commercialized with the help of Process Technology.
• Process Improvement, Quality Improvement and Manufacturing Cost Reduction: Using systematic processes, such as Six Sigma methodology, Process Technology’s engineers are responsible for assisting the plants with their operational excellence programs. This includes raw material yield improvements, capacity increases, utility reduction, etc. There are numerous instances where Process Technology was active in helping the plants reduce their costs by millions of dollars and increase capacity without capital.
• New Technologies: Process Technology is the key driver behind developing new manufacturing processes that position Arkema’s manufacturing plants to be cost competitive. Two examples of this are the Sulfox distillation tower and a dewatering extruder used for the manufacture of Kynar®. In both examples, multiple processing stages were combined into a single piece of equipment.
• Capital Projects: Process technology is active in almost all stages of most plant capital projects, from concept development through startup. Process Technology led the process development effort to convert an existing idled unit at our Clearlake, TX plant to make a new meth acrylic product.
• Cross Functional Co-ordination: As a cross business unit organization, Process Technology plays a key role in coordinating concepts and know-how between our global plants, business units and departments. For example, Process Technology organizes a bi-annual engineer networking conference and runs the developing engineer recruiting and training program.
• Facilitates Best Practice and Tools: There are several tools, which are applied across the organization, and are not owned by any one business unit. Process technology fills this gap allowing the manufacturing and technology organization to operate effectively.

The Process Technology staff is composed of chemical engineers, operators and mechanics. Recent projects completed by the group include the Sulfox Thiochemical Intermediate Plant in Beaumont, Texas, the Kynar® Tiger plant in China, the Forane® 32 project in Calvert City, Kentucky, the new acrylic monomer reactor in Clearlake, Texas, and the conversion of a Butyl Acrylate unit to Ethyl Acrylate in Bayport, Texas.