THE BONDING ELEMENT


Although Arkema keeps the ability to make polymer foams, such as this one being tested by a tech- nician, it won’t sell the foam directly. It sells the components. “Most often, if you buy an Arkema product, it’s going to be a component of the thing you buy,” said Dirkx. “We’re a very important component because we are—think of it as the glue that holds the whole thing together.”


ethanol-based fuels. Tey’re highly cor- rosive, and they’re much more so than straight gasoline. And they tend to per- meate fuel lines more readily.


So when the industry moved in that direction, those regulatory changes cre- ated opportunities for us to develop new polymers, new multilayer solutions, new tubing, and that forced that whole supply chain that I previously described to get aligned to offer new solutions to the auto- motive industry. So regulations are very powerful in driving change.


Army AL&T: How much of your product development is developing a completely new product—the “new Kynar,” for example—and how much of it is trying


to find different applications for products you’ve already developed? With differ- ent applications, do you establish new requirements?


Dirkx: Tere is a third type of R&D work as well, qualification of our cur- rent products in current applications but at new customers, and a fourth, techni- cal service to keep our products running competitively at our current customers. You need to have a balance of these, and each business unit will have a different balance governed more or less by the markets they serve, their current business strategy and the window of opportunity.


But our platforms tend to spawn proj- ects, and the best platforms are those


we can draw from to solve a number of problems in the marketplace or with our customers, or to bring value to our cus- tomer base. Block copolymers is a good example of that, and I’ll give you another one. We saw, a decade ago or so, this shift in the lighting industry to LED technol- ogy. And, of course, next it’s going to go to what’s


called “OLED” technology,


organic light-emitting diodes. In our Plexiglas division, besides the taillights I mentioned, we have a number of light- ing applications. Just like in computer displays, there are a lot of places where there’s an interaction between polymers and light. In particular, Plexiglas often finds use in applications where appear- ance is really important, this interplay with light. We said, “Tis is going to


ASC.ARMY.MIL 87


CRITICAL THINKING


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