MAPCO ENGINEERING’s Glues and Resins plants can largely satisfy the needs of wood based panels industries offering different processes and capacity all characterized by safety, low production costs, environmental and user-friendly.

For the solid handling, MAPCO ENGINEERING can provide either a mechanic (bulk storage, hopper, bucket elevator, screw conveyor, big-bag etc.), pneumatic (silos, pneumatic conveyor, cyclones) or liquid system like fully automatic UDS (Urea Dissolution System)

​All MAPCO ENGINEERING plants are provided with ACS (Advanced Control System allowing the fine tuning-up of additives feeding, immediate sampling analysis of products and very accurate production running conditions.
Batch Process
Most of the resins production is obtained by batch production.
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MAPCO Batch Process – MBP - needs few plant components. In fact, all the necessary operations for each step of reaction can take place in one stirred reactor (raw materials charge, heating, acidification, first-step reaction, cooling, second-step reaction, etc.).

The batch process is the most popular one because it is suitable even for very small production requiring a low investment, it is user-friendly and presents a high flexibility, such as changing the product characteristics for every batch.

Nevertheless, as much as the size of the equipment increases, the production costs increase considerably too. In fact, in the batch process the equipment performs the same services (heating, cooling, loading, etc.) at maximum design capacity only for a short period of the whole batch, which is usually of 8 hours.
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Therefore, during most of the batch period, the equipment capacity either does not perform as it should or it is not used at its best.
Continuos Process
To reduce the production costs, it is more convenient to obtain the resins production using the MAPCO Continuous Process – MCP - provided that the production rate is high and without remarkable changes of its characteristic.

In this process, instead of one stirred reactor only for all steps of the poly-condensation, there are smaller reactors, heat exchangers, pumps, agitators etc. dedicated to each phase of the reaction (cooling, heating, reaction). Therefore, they are generally very small and optimized at their best as they are designed only for hourly production.

In MCP a Urea Formaldehyde solution is prepared in the dissolution system by mixing continuously formaldehyde with prilled urea. This reaction mixture is transferred to the stirring vessel where the catalyst is added.
After the acidified reaction, the mixture is injected into the reactor for the main condensation step. This is a stirring vessel working at high temperature and under pressure. The second poly-condensation step occurs in a reactor under atmospheric pressure.

Then the product feeds the post-condensation and neutralization reactor by the addition of urea and sodium hydroxide. Later, it reaches the distillation tank where most of the water evaporates under vacuum.

After the distillation step, the product is cooled under vacuum in a column. Then it is transferred via an intermediate daily tank to the glue tank farm.

As for the process equipment, the utilities and ancillary units too (cooling water, steam, vacuum, electrical transformer switchboard and distribution etc.) are sized for hourly capacity performance. In this way, there is a remarkably reduction of the overall investment.
Mixed Process
To obtain the main benefits of both processes i.e. the flexibility of the batch units as well as smaller equipment for almost all their specific service, Mapco provides a Mixed Process – MMP.

This one presents basically two different sections. In the first one all hot batch reactions take place in one reactor, while in the other one the finishing and continuous reactions and the resins cooling occur.
