PureCycle Technologies’ Post

Transcript

On this episode of Inside Pure Cycle, we're visiting our state-of-the-art Research and Development lab in Durham, NC and introducing you to the amazing team members who worked there in the projects they're focused on. I'm Michael Weber. I'm the Vice President of Technology. And I'm basically over all of our lab scale and pilot plant testing and consulting on all of our technology improvements, optimizations. But with the commissioning of the lab, the big thing is to have the tools to follow up on ideas, bridge your back doors. And anytime we have a process improvement in the big plant, we'd like to be able to test it on the lab 1st. And if you don't have the instrument or the piece of equipment you use to test the theory that you had. Sometimes those ideas just die on the vine. O It's really good to be able to test those things. I think it's absolutely critical. O This is kind of the the first section of our lab where we're focused on analytical analysis of the plastics. So we have a lot of standard analytical techniques to measure things like the plastic composition, the plastic viscosity, how well did it flows, the solids content and the plastic. And these are standard analytical pieces of equipment, but in a lot of times we're using them in a novel way. We develop some of our own techniques to characterize the what we need to learn. Specifically for recycle plastic feet, we also use to analyze our product to understand how the feedstock quality maps of the product quality. We also use this part of the lab to look at our core products, our coproduct 1 and our coproduct 2. So there's a lot of standard analytical pieces of equipment here that we're using in non standard ways to apply the recycled plastic. My name is Twinkle Patel and I am a polymer chemist here at Pierce Cycle. I've been here for over seven months and what I do is basically testing all the feedstocks and products that come from our process. We do a lot of characterizations using the different analytical techniques that we have here. We have to interact with the team in Ironton to be able to know what. They need from us the problems they're having, and then we come together as a team here at the Research Center. I'll figure out a way how we can assist Ironton. Also, we've made some discoveries that's going to alter the way other future plants will be built. O my name is Leo Rosso and I'm a polymer analytical technician. And my day-to-day usually involves feedstock characterization as well as product characterization. I enjoy that we really get to see the impact that our work here at the lab does at the plant when it comes from our main recycled product or CP1 and CP2. The data we give back to the plant really impact the process that's going on there. And I feel that it's really important what we do. This is what I'll call the customer support part of our lab. So we talked about how we have a portion of our lab that can analyze the feed and product properties, but this is where we can actually reproduce some of the forms that are plastic would be used in by the customer. So we have a extruder line here that can either just blend plastic into pellets. It can also press plastic into thin film. We also have a blown film line, which is another way to make film. We're actually blowing the plastic into a bubble, so. For very specialized applications like film, this gives us the opportunity to see how our recycled material will perform compared to other applications. O we're able to gather data on some of these fundamental properties that our customers care about and also actually press it into the form that they might use in their application. Because as you can imagine, some applications are more difficult than others to get into. So being able to press something like a film or color and clarity and limited impurities is a very, very important. It's good to be able to demonstrate that to our customer, or if they have problems, to be able to bring our resin back to the lab and be able to figure out a way to solve their problem with the equipment that we have. My name is Robert's life. And I am the Director of Product Development and what we really do here is provide solutions to different customer questions. One thing which we're working on now is taking our general purpose polymer and try to make it fit for the fiber industry is very challenging because in the fiber industry has a lot of demands. Most companies, startup companies don't have what we have here. So that common. So they rely on a third party lab which will take. Time. But here with the talent that we have, equipment that we have, we're able to provide answer quickly and correctly. The unit that I have behind me is actually a small scale version of our purification process. So we do everything at the large scale system in Ironton here on a very small scale, which allows us to test new feedstocks. If there's limits to what we can learn in the other section of the lab where we're characterizing the plastic, this allows us to actually execute the purification process and see how the material comes out. It also allows us to help troubleshoot. And improve on some of the aspects of the actual commercial process. Anytime that you can learn something about the process without going to the large scale, it's advantageous to do that. Basically, if you want to make a change, you'd like to do that on the smallest process you can and still feel like that change will translate to the larger scale process. So it allows us to make changes very quickly and very inexpensively, which helps foster innovation. Because of an idea comes up, you can actually test it rather than have to go through a long process, or you could actually see if your idea. Works. My name's Joseph Sarver. I'm the Research Center manager here at the Purse Cycle Research and Development Center in Durham, NC. So whenever you scale up any technology, there's always going to be learnings in going from, as we've done, a pure cycle bench top scale and a lab to pilot scale at the FSU and now commercial scale and Iron 10. There's different learnings and questions that have come out of that process that here in our lab we've worked to address with different types of capabilities. That we've been developing, whether that's understanding viscosity or understanding how different feedstocks may impact our process or understanding different operating conditions that we may explore, all of that we've been able to kind of bring in house here to further those discovery efforts and we're getting a lot of really interesting data, some of it. I just think it's been really impactful in how we understand the coproducts in our process and how we understand our product itself. What's been amazing about working with this group of people is so far we haven't come across anything that we don't think we can do. So I'm a chemical engineer and Leo and Twinkle are both chemist. So they bring a completely different perspective into analytical work that maybe I didn't appreciate. And then so I have some of the process backgrounds from my time in Ironton and from my chemical engineering degree that we've been kind of able to exchange. And learn each other's strengths. It's good to have a variety of perspectives on any problems. So like we've got myself that has like an engineering background, Rob a comes from a material science background. So we, we spent a lot of time teaching each other different things. But sometimes you get ingrained a certain way of thinking and it's good to have. It's it's good for you to explain it to somebody else. So you rethink the way that the what you're understanding of a certain process and it's also good to have. Somebody come in and approach your problem that may not be unlike any other homework or research problem they've had to work on in their career, and they come out from a different perspective.