Teijin Aramid and Dutch research and technology company Avantium announced yesterday that they have entered into an R&D partnership to explore high-performance polymers.

The partnership builds on Teijin Aramid’s leading position in polyaramids and Avantium’s catalytic technology for producing building blocks for green materials and fuels. Avantium is a research and technology company that is unlocking a new generation of biobased chemical building blocks, under the brand name YXY.

The companies will work together to explore the properties and commercial potential of high-performance polymers containing YXY building blocks and will produce a range of polymer products containing the building blocks. Subsequently, Teijin Aramid plans to test these products for different applications.

The two companies have entered into a multi-year collaboration agreement with milestones for monitoring progress towards commercialization of the new polymers. The partners have also successfully secured a government grant to support part of the work under the agreement.

Gert Frederiks, CEO & President of Teijin Aramid said: “Teijin Aramid is dedicated to fully understand the needs and requirements of our customers in order to empower their products and their business with the best solutions.

We are therefore constantly looking for new ways to improve our polymer products and processes in order to deliver maximum added value to our customers. In Avantium we have found a partner that is excelling in the field of advanced high-throughput R&D and offers a line of bio based chemical building blocks for green polymers that will enable us to realize this ambition.”

“By partnering with Teijin Aramid we can develop a novel and exciting application for our YXY building blocks,” said Tom van Aken, CEO of Avantium. “Together with Teijin Aramid we aim to achieve a set of unique properties for polymer products using our biobased YXY building blocks. Teaming up with Teijin Aramid, a leader in this field, clearly accelerates the application development of materials containing YXY building blocks. This agreement is an important step to explore high-value added applications for our YXY biobased materials.”

Green building blocks

Avantium has developed YXY – a family of green building blocks for making materials and fuels that can compete on price and performance. YXY (pronounced ~ixy) is a patented technology that converts biomass into Furanics. It is said to be the perfect solution for today’s challenges as it uses carbohydrates as feedstock, enabling the manufacture of green and sustainable products.

The fast and cost-effective production process is based on Avantium’s catalytic technology and YXY can be implemented in existing chemical production methods, according to Avantium. Avantium collaborates with leading companies such as NatureWorks, Teijin Aramid and DAF Trucks to start using green materials and fuels based on YXY building blocks.

Teijin Aramid is a subsidiary of the Teijin Group which manufactures Twaron , Sulfron, Teijinconex and Technora. These are renowned for their strength, sustainability, heat resistance and low weight and can be found worldwide in different applications and markets including automotive, ballistic protection, marine, civil engineering, protective clothing, optical fibre cables, and oil and gas. The four high-performance aramids are produced in the Netherlands and Japan.