ExxonMobil combats film design complexity with new PE resins platform

13 Apr 2022 --- ExxonMobil is introducing Exceed S performance PE resins, combining “industry-leading” stiffness and toughness with easy processing. Utilizing the company’s latest innovations in polymer science, the new PE platform provides opportunities to reduce the complexity of film formulations and designs while improving film performance, conversion efficiency, and packaging durability versus current market references. 

The company describes modern film design as a story of increasing complexity and compromise between performance and processability for durable packaging and high customer satisfaction. 

Multi-component resin blends in coextruded and laminated films with high layer counts are commonplace. Every step of producing and converting printed film into durable packaging is prone to complexity-induced inefficiency, scrap and human mistakes. Exceed S performance PE resins are designed to help simplify this.

“Exceed S performance PE resins deliver simplicity without compromise,” says Tom Miller, Exceed S marketing manager at ExxonMobil. “With Exceed S, converters can obtain high levels of performance with easy processing, stiffness and toughness with less blending, and resin solutions that can simplify operations and improve package durability. In short, it is a platform of performance PE grades designed to do so much, so simply.”

Converters can rethink film design with Exceed S performance PE by:

• Creating stiff, tough, functional layers to maximize performance 
• Leveraging increased performance to help facilitate solutions with environmental sustainability benefits
• Reducing the need to add HDPE for stiffness or LDPE for processing
• Creating flatter, less extensible films to increase print and package line efficiency
• Delivering more durable flexible packaging, contributing to consumer satisfaction and helping to reduce food waste

Commercially available grades
The first three commercially available grades of Exceed S resins are designed to ensure low melt pressure and high output on blown film lines. The combined benefits allow the creation of a broad range of packaging and film applications: 

• Large-format heavy-duty sacks used in industry and agriculture, along with silo bags for farming, can benefit from increased puncture, impact and tear resistance. Exceed S resin’s combination of low melt pressure and high extrusion output can also help increase the converter’s production capacity.
• In primary packaging, non-laminated coextruded films used in pouches and bags containing liquid, food, or other goods can benefit from improved toughness and are less likely to break when transported or dropped. For example, multi-wall bladders used in hot-filled bag-in-box packaging exhibit exceptional resistance to heat-induced blocking and flex cracking. 
• PE//PE laminates with improved stiffness, toughness and bag drop survival can help facilitate larger pouch sizes and accommodate bulkier, heavier contents, helping to expand market usage of mechanically recyclable packaging.

Increased film performance
In these types of applications, the outstanding mechanical properties of Exceed S resins can be used to increase film performance, maintain comparable performance at a thinner gauge, produce more durable monomaterial products, or incorporate high percentages of recycled content. Providing such solutions is part of ExxonMobil’s four-pronged approach of using performance polymers to help facilitate solutions with environmental sustainability benefits.

“ExxonMobil has been at the forefront of PE innovation for nearly thirty years,” says David Hergenrether, vice president for PE at ExxonMobil. “The new Exceed S platform embodies our most advanced product and process development informed by deep, long-standing partnerships with our customers.”

“The innovation opportunities that Exceed S performance PE offers have already resulted in successful collaborations with more than 75 customers globally working on more than 100 different applications. We look forward to collaborating with our customers on new opportunities to advance their products.”

Edited by Joshua Poole