polyester intermediates (DMT) & polyester polymer solutions

Performance fabrics, easy care materials, cosy, comfortable duvets and pillows, film for packaging (BOPET), fibres, filaments, industrial yarns for seatbelts and tyres, powder coating and many other products have one thing in common: They are made of a synthetic material, Polyester.

Polyester has many valuable properties: good clarity, stiffness, strength, heat stability and chemical stability among many others, which make it useful for a wide range of applications.

Manmade fibres, films, engineering polymers, packaging and sheets are part of a huge range of products that we take for granted as a part of modern life. The vast majority of these are made from Polyester which is in turn derived from an intermediate, Dimethylterephthalate.

Dimethylterephthalate (DMT)

DMT was the original intermediate manufactured to carry the chemical diacid required to form polyester. When Polyester was developed and commericalized during the 1940s and 1950s  DMT was used as  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 kt/a but through a series of expansions, has                         progressively increased in capacity to 280 kt. 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 paraxylene and methanol. 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. It is also available in solid form (briquettes and flakes) for external market needs.

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 industry.

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