Tomšiceva cesta 9
1330 Kocevje, Slovenia
Tel +386 41 709694
[email protected]
www.smartmelamine.com

The Slovenian company smartMelamine d.o.o. officially started the industrial production of meltblown nonwovens made of melamine in September 2018. Nonwovens made from the raw material melamine resins, using a meltblown process, are able for the first time to combine the outstanding properties of the raw material with the benefits of a meltblown.

In a longer development process, it was possible for the first time to make the raw material melamine resin available for a thermoplastic processing process and to produce a duromeric end product – smartMelamine. Raw material and manufacturing processes were patented.

The fleece made with this process belongs to the class of high-performance materials—it does not burn, shrink and or melt, remains stable even at higher temperatures and is UV-resistant. smartMelamine is an excellent thermal and acoustic insulator and is also well suited for filtration due to the fine fibers and its chemical resistance.

Due to the meltblown technology, the smartMelamine nonwoven can also be produced using very fine fibers, even well below 2µm fiber diameter. This makes it suitable for the use in hot-gas filtration, liquid filtration and air filtration, where filter classes in the range of G2 – F9 have been measured.

In hot-gas filtration aramid type filters and other traditional filters generally have much coarser fibers compared to smartMelamine. With the addition of smartMelamine as one of the layers in a sandwich construction between two aramid layers, produced in a water entangling process, the filter efficiency can increase up to 10 times. A very low dust leakage and very high dust retention was observed under the VDI 3926-1 norm. Additionally, smartMelamine is chemically resistant and offers improved non-burning properties to the composite, due to the properties of the melamine resin.

As an organic material, smartMelamine could prove to be a synthetic substitute to glass fibers, due to a growing number of reports on negative health effects of glass fibers (shown to be linked to the manifestation of cancer), the company says.

Different applications in the fields of thermal and acoustic insulation or filtration are shortly before their market launch, for use in the transportation sector (cars, trains, buses, airplanes), workwear, hot gas filtration, in construction and in various industrial applications.

smartMelamine d.o.o., a joint venture of the German TITK Group based in Rudolstadt and the listed company Melamine d.d. based in Kocevje, Slovenia, have together invested €10 million in the development of the production plant during the last two years. The individual components of the 100-meter-long production line were supplied by German and Slovenian machine-builders. The manufacturing process developed by TITK combines textile and chemical processes ingeniously. At the Kocevje location, 30 jobs will initially be created.

In the initial phase, up to 2000 tons of melamine nonwovens can be produced annually, in a width up to 2400 mm and a weights ranging from 20-600 gsm. The certification of the products according to Öko Tex Standard 100 and VDA 275 is in preparation.