CLEVELAND - The Lubrizol Corp.'s Performance Coatings business has completed a significant project to expand capacity and increase manufacturing efficiencies at its solvent acrylics production facility in Sant Cugat, Spain.

Over the past two years, Lubrizol made significant investments to automate two independent production lines for the highly specialized solvent acrylic resin. This automation helped achieve the goal of creating efficiency and flexibility while also improving quality and increasing capacity. The investment included a new loading system for monomers and solvents, new premix and initiator tanks and their related dosing systems, new filters, two new bulk resins pipelines, and a semi-automatic packaging machine.

This upgrade also allowed for the integration of these production lines into the plant's Distributed Control System (DCS). "These upgrades were critical to ensuring a highly reliable unit, meeting our customers demand and quality expectations and reaching our high performance goals," said Jordi Fernandez, Lubrizol Process Engineer.