Performance fabrics, easy care materials, cosy, comfortable duvets and pillows, soft drinks and mineral water bottles, wine boxes, food trays, video and audio tapes, x-ray and photographic film and many other products we touch and use day to day all have one thing in common. They are usually made of a synthetic material called polyester.

Polyester has many valuable properties - superb clarity, stiffness, strength, heat stability and the fact that it is an excellent gas/moisture barrier. These properties make polyesters useful for a wide range of applications

Man made fibre, films, bottles, sheets and containers are part of a huge range of products that we take for granted as part of modern life. The vast majority of these are made from polyester which is in turn derived from one of two 'polyester intermediates':

• Pure Terephthalic Acid (PTA or TPA)
  
• Di-Methyl Terephthalate (DMT)
  

We in ADVANSA make and sell both of these intermediates, without which our modern life styles would be impossible.

Our PTA and DMT finds its way into not only all of our own products that can be found on the pages of this website (resins, bottles, staple fibres, filament yarns) but those of many polyester products produced by a whole host of manufacturers. As well as fibres, resins, bottles, sheeting the other areas where polyester intermediates, particularly PTA, are used today are:


Films

Polyester film is widely used in packaging, electrical applications such as motor winding isolation, circuit board finish, video and audio recording tape, wind surf sails, hot air balloons and even bank notes!


Coatings & Adhesives

Solvent free powder coatings based on PTA are used in a wide range of applications where weathering and corrosion resistance is required as well as the base for high strength glues in use for example in the shoe and car industries.


Pure Terephthalic Acid (PTA)

PTA is a fine white powder, usually more than 99.98% pure (purer indeed than many medicines), and is manufactured by reacting a substance called paraxylene in air. This reaction produces a crude Terephthalic Acid powder, which is purified at high temperatures and pressures in water to form PTA.

The manufacturing process comprises many stages and involves many processes, starting with feed mixing and progressing through reaction, crystallisation, separation, drying, recovery of solvents and effluent treatment.

In ADVANSA (as ICI) we first produced PTA at a plant in Wilton, UK in 1968. That plant had a capacity of about 36ktpa, our current capacity is over 550ktpa. As well as increasing capacity we have invested, and continue to invest in PTA technology in order to make our plants more energy efficient, environmentally friendlier and simpler to build and operate.

Today PTA is the intermediate of choice in the production of polyester. Modern PTA production plants are more efficient than DMT plants and the product produces higher quality polyester more safely, effectively, and efficiently than DMT.

We are fully committed to world-class standards of safety, health and environmental care and this philosophy is borne out on our PTA manufacturing plants.


Di-Methyl Terephthalate (DMT)

DMT was the original intermediate manufactured to carry the chemical 'ester' required to be polymerised to form polyester. In ADVANSA we originally produced our polyester fibres in the late 1940s using DMT as our feedstock. When the first fibres lines were built at our Adana plant in the late 1960s we chose to use DMT as feedstock as well.

The original DMT plant at Adana had a capacity of 60 ktpa but through a series of expansions, has progressively increased in capacity to 240 kte. Investments in DMT technology have been made to increase production yields, to make quality improvements and to reduce energy and raw material consumption.

The process starts with the same raw material as for the production of PTA, paraxylene. The DMT is produced in a series of process stages including reaction, esterification, distillation and crystallisation.

DMT in molten form is fed directly to the downstream polymer plants of ADVANSA located at Adana. DMT is solid flake form is also available for external market needs.

DMT was historically used in the manufacturing of polyester for use in the fibres and films industries, most of the new plants making polyester now use PTA as their feedstock. One area where DMT is experiencing growth in demand is in the production of the polyester based engineering resin, poly-butylene terephthalate (PBT) which is increasingly being used in the automotive and electronics industries.