New Victrex® Peek Polymer Grades Meet Demanding FDA Requirements For Food Processing Applications

Greenville, SC – (April 17, 2006) – Victrex plc has introduced a series of advanced VICTREX® PEEK polymer material-filled grades that have been approved for use in food processing and related industrial applications. The new FDA-compliant grades can be used to make articles or components that will come into repeated contact with food during processing. To meet a wide range of temperature, chemical, physical, and other processing requirements, as well as cosmetic and aesthetic demands, the new grades have been developed to complement existing VICTREX PEEK unfilled grades that are already FDA compliant.

As well as the unfilled grades initially developed for such applications, the new glass-filled grades all comply with the compositional requirements of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)¹s FDA 21 CFR 177.2415 standard.

As a result of extensive research and field trials, the new grades have been proven to offer a number of advantages over competitive materials, including the ability to reduce processing downtime through better physical performance, and providing more cost-efficient design of intricate parts. Concludes Andrew Ragan, Product Manager for Victrex USA Inc., "This new family of VICTREX PEEK polymer grades is an important addition to our material range. By meeting the particularly challenging requirements of food processing applications, we have demonstrated that VICTREX PEEK can be tailored to and designed for use in a vast range of components, in numerous applications, and across a huge number of industries."

The new grades can be used in a wide variety of applications in the food processing sector, including as bearings, seatings and seals, precision cutting blades, and energy-efficient pumps.