As part of the international Steele Group, HÄNDLE offers a range of solutions for shaping tough raw materials. A project in the United Kingdom showcased the advantages of our global resources and how our on-site experts connect customers with the technology they need.

Sibelco is a global material solutions company which sources, transforms and distributes specialty industrial minerals, particularly silica, clays, feldspathics and olivine. The company is also a leader in glass recycling. Sibelco operates a specialty mineral clay processing plant and needed a higher throughput material shaping solution. After extensive material testing in the HÄNDLE application lab in Mühlacker (Germany) and the Steele test lab in Statesville, North Carolina (USA), our experts concluded that the best solution would be built around a mid-sized stiff extrusion system from Steele. The project plan called for Steele to supply and install the machines, with HÄNDLE providing project management and electrical controls. Steele delivered a 45ATX extruder for installation in early 2020, but the pandemic kept them out of the customer’s facility in the UK for this project.

HÄNDLE provided the necessary expertise, solved the challenges of the required throughput rates in constant communications with Steele, and carried out the commissioning. In addition to the expertise of the local representative on site, HÄNDLE benefited from the tremendous cooperation and support the company received from Sibelco. “The machines are running very well and the Steele 45AEX extruder has already proven to be robust, powerful and process stable. We achieved our required throughput for all the recipes to be processed,” said a pleased Peter Harris, UK engineering manager at Sibelco, after the project was completed.

Together with its parent company J. C. Steele & Sons (USA), HÄNDLE constitutes an international group of companies with locations in the USA, Australia, Germany, Poland, Brazil and Russia, with regional representatives all over the world. The Group also includes Direxa Engineering, a Colorado-based engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm specializing in plants for construction materials and fines agglomeration.

Thanks to the close cooperation within the Steele Group, our companies can develop the best solution for customer material and production requirements. In addition to basic raw material and extrusion testing in our own application laboratories, our solutions include plant design, engineering and construction, material storage, sizing, mixing and shaping with first-class sales service and technical support after the sale.