In response to increasing market demand for sustainable solutions, companies are increasingly developing new materials, including bio-composites. TECOS Slovenian Tool and Die Development Centre supports partners with comprehensive product development services, ranging from conceptual design to the development of functional prototypes and production. With its state-of-the-art equipment, TECOS now provides even more complete services in the field of material development and validation.
Twin-Screw Extruder and Tensile Testing for More Reliable Development of Innovative Materials
TECOS has upgraded its research infrastructure with a co-rotating twin-screw extruder enabling the preparation of various composite materials, recyclates and other blends. An additional investment in a tensile testing machine expands TECOS’s capabilities in the field of mechanical material testing. Together, these two innovations complete the material-development process—from designing and preparing composites to verifying their mechanical properties—ensuring faster and more reliable development of innovative solutions for industry.
The extruder represents a major added value not only for laboratory-scale and pilot-scale development of new materials and technologies, but also for producing small-series industrial batches. It enables precise and repeatable dosing of material components. The tensile testing machine expands TECOS’s capacity for mechanical testing: equipped with a 10 kN load frame and load cell, as well as a temperature chamber (–30 °C to +100 °C), it allows tensile tests, three-point bending tests, compression tests, and adhesion tests. This enables more comprehensive material characterization and validation of properties under real-world conditions. A significant advantage of this new equipment is that it allows TECOS to independently perform mechanical testing on materials developed and prepared using its twin-screw extruder.
Comprehensive Material Development and Validation Services
With the new extruder and tensile testing equipment, TECOS offers partners an even more complete set of services for material development and validation—ranging from early-stage research and formulation optimization to test-scale and small-series production. These upgrades strengthen the competitive advantage of companies in the introduction of new solutions into industrial practice.
The expanded capabilities differentiate TECOS from other providers through its end-to-end engineering support, offering everything in one place: from initial concepts, material development, simulations, prototypes, and tooling, to small-series production. This approach ensures a faster development cycle, higher quality, and fewer risks. Companies also benefit from ongoing support from TECOS’s expert team, which combines knowledge across diverse engineering fields.
