Breen Color Concentrates needs to make top quality pellets so its customers products can be top quality. Customers also often need a fast color match and shipment. Breen opted for a Quick Clean Color Change compounding line from Technical Process and Engineering Inc. (TPEI; Lehighton, PA), and not just for the name.

Breen (Lambertville, NJ) has made custom color concentrates since 1976 for blowmolding, wire and cable, extrusion, and injection processors, and knows what it wants in a compounding line. It considered several solutions for its newest compounding line, a key part of its capacity expansion program. That included twin-screw extrusion, and after evaluation, Breen decided on TPEI’s free-motor mixer technology. As Breen’s President, Howard DeMonte, explains, “They could customize their compounding line to provide the kind of rapid order turnaround our customers expect while maintaining our exacting quality requirements.”

How fast? Harold Schafer, CEO of TPEI, credits the perfect mating of the pelletizing system and TPEI’s free-rotor mixer to form a synchronous system. “If Breen runs a batch of black,” he says, “the whole system—from initial blender through the last shaker screen, as well as the mezzanine stairs and floor—needs to be “Class-A” clean before white. On other systems, such clean-up could take up to three hours. With the free-rotor mixer and the MB500 pelletizing system it can be done in half an hour.” —[email protected]