Toray Plastics (America), Inc., Opens New PEF Division Innovation Center
- Published: March 17, 2020
Toray Plastics (America), Inc., announced that it has opened the PEF Division Innovation Center at its operations in Front Royal, Virginia. The new $4 million, 5,000-square-foot Innovation Center houses a state-of-the-art, custom designed pilot line, which enables Toray to explore and qualify new resin systems and technologies, develop new products quickly, and commercialize customer-specific solutions. The Innovation Center is a component of the company’s recent $40 million expansion, which increased the facility’s footprint by 74,000 square feet and also includes a new extrusion line, a new irradiation unit, and a new salt bath unit.
The PEF Division manufactures advanced, precision-engineered, irradiation-crosslinked, polypropylene and polyethylene foam for automotive, flooring, and industrial applications, including gasket, tape, and composites. Toray’s foams are recognized for their consistent thickness and density. The ToraSoft® brand is established worldwide as the premier foam for luxury haptics in automotive applications. It is specified by OEMs, trim component processors, and Tier 1 suppliers and used on more than 160 automotive models globally.
“Toray is renowned for its high-quality foams and expertise as an innovator, and the new Innovation Center will allow us to do more of what we do best: innovate on behalf of our customers,” says Jack White, director of sales, PEF Division. “The markets we serve are diverse and evolving. More customers are requesting specific solutions for their material systems. Having an in-house lab equipped with a proprietary pilot line allows us to leverage our intellectual property freely. We can now compound, extrude and coextrude, and laminate foam to custom materials and constructions with even greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness. These capabilities, coupled with our expanded manufacturing capacity, allow us to be a customer’s true strategic partner in foam innovation.”
For more information, visit www.toraytpa.com.
