With its recent appointment as the representative of three Hosokawa Alpine divisions for the sales territories of the GCC countries, Riyadh-based Modern Plastic Technology is expecting to expand on the regional market through the delivery of a wide range of Alpine’s products and solutions.
Modern will now represent Hosokawa Alpine’s three divisions that are part of the company’s powder and particle processing business segment – chemicals, pharma and food and recycling, and granulators – in the markets of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Bahrain.
Founded in 1898, in Augsburg under the name of Holzhäuer’sche Maschinenfabrik, the company changed its name to Alpine Maschinenfabrik in 1909 and its production programme already included size reduction and classifying machines for the food, animal feed and chemical industries, motor cable winches, hard crushers, system engineering, cryo technology and foundry.
In 1987 the company became part of the Hosokawa Micron Corporation, Osaka that has production facilities in five countries, 12 research and development and testing centres worldwide. Last year, the group achieved a consolidated turnover of $350 million with a staff of 1,700 employees.
Today, Hosokawa Alpine is a high-tech company with a 54,770 sq m factory in Augsburg and a staff of more than 500 employees and has reached a leading market position in its core businesses. For over a century, Alpine has been a pioneer in the field of mechanical process technology, gained an immense fund of know-how and became a traditional trendsetter on the market, says a spokesman.
The company is into the development, design and manufacture of components and turnkey systems for the dry and wet processing of powders, granules and bulk materials for the chemical, pharmaceutical, food, minerals, metals and recycling industries. The more demanding the problem specification, the more customers profit from Alpine’s comprehensive engineering services that comprises design engineering, from flowcharts, installation planning, safety concepts such as ATEX, project documentation, to piping and instrument (P and I) diagrams, calculation and layout, specification of components as well as the design, programming and networking of visualisation systems and the project coordination, site supervision, assembly and installation, commissioning, CE certification and training of operating staff.
“The name Alpine stands for competence in every possible communication technology issue,” says the spokesman. “Many years of close cooperation between Alpine’s engineers and the development departments of their customers have made them into leading specialists for powder and particle processing around the world. The machine and systems offered include crushers, fluidised bed opposed jet mills, hammer mills, ball mills, air jet sieves, impact mills, agitated ball mills, granulators, safety crushers, classifiers and classifier mills.
“To make it even easier for the customers from all the different branches of industry to find the right partner for their problem specification, the powder and particle processing division is split into divisions that include: chemicals, pharma and food, minerals and metals, recycling and granulators and service.”
Alpine’s range of chemical products is just as wide and diverse as are the different demands on the properties of the pigments or powders produced. Alpine supplies machines and systems for processing basic chemical products and auxiliary products, as well as toner, paints, pigments, cosmetics, waxes, resins, glues, herbicides and fertilizers as a single-source partner.
“Such a comprehensive range of products means that Alpine is able to meet a broad spectrum of requirements that may arise from the company’s different customers,” says the spokesman.
The company’s recycling and granulators division is specialised in complete granulator systems to include all necessary system components. Whether the feed material is injection mouldings, sprues, film webs or film edge trims, Alpine’s granulators are designed for even the most difficult cutting tasks. In addition, the division also supplies in-line recycling solutions for caoutchouc, cable or wood chips which are tailored to the individual requirements.
The company’s service division gives support during the entire lifetime of a Hosokawa Alpine system or machine and its extensive range of services includes spare parts supply, maintenance, inspection, servicing, repairs, general overhauls, system upgrading and training.
At its application testing centre in Augsburg, Alpine has more than 60 most modern machines in production scale and lab/pilot plant scale offering unique possibilities of wet and dry processing. The centre allows the company to offer customer trials with the objective of determining both the optimum system layout and the processing guarantee values. The 3,000 sq m, centre provides ample space for execution of all the basic operations in the fields of mechanical and thermal processing technology that includes:
• Size reduction (dry and wet);
• Granulator technology/shredding;
• Air classification;
• Wet classification;
• Sieving, screening, settling;
• Mixing, drying, impact drying; and
• On-line (i.e. direct at the grinding and classifying system) particle size analysis of dry powders in the range 0.5 µm to 850 µm.
Annexed to the centre is a modern testing laboratory with a range of measuring instruments that are used to assess quality assurance. All operating data of the systems can be recorded, meaning that a complete documentation of the test results can be provided. Test systems must always be state of the art if optimum baseline data are to be delivered, therefore the plant and machinery is renewed on an ongoing basis and is supplemented with newly developed machines, he concludes.
