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The Project

Extrusion and co-extrusion of sheet and profile are important industrial processes within the EU. There are approximately 1100 distinct extruder operations in Western Europe extruding some 10 million tonnes of thermoplastic. However, due to the inherently viscous nature of polymers, output rates are limited at normal processing temperatures. If the processing temperature is increased, degradation of material can occur resulting in loss of mechanical properties, flow instabilities and discolouration. These issues have environmental and cost issues that have resulted in the loss of production capacity to lower wage economies outside of the EU.



A technology developed by two of the consortium partners has shown that plastics extrusion equipment can be modified to allow for compressed CO₂ to be used as a processing aid for the production of solid extrudate with reduced melt viscosities, thus allowing processing at faster output rates, reduced temperatures or reduced energy.

The project aims to develop the necessary technologies to allow for industrial scale, commercially viable extrusion and co-extrusion of solid sheet and profile either by retrofitting the equipment to current machinery or by fitting to new extruders.

The main technical goals of the FlowFree project are to:

• Develop a prototype extruder that will allow full industrial, commercial development of the process.


• Develop the process on an industrial scale for SMEs with different production requirements.


• Demonstrate the technical and commercial viability of the process on full industrial scale.