Farrel Pomini's new US headquarters the right size for growth

Ansonia, Conn. — Farrel Pomini employees are working on the long-term future, such as the growing use of biopolymers and new compounding technology, while they look to the past — literally over the hill from their gleaming new building in Ansonia.

The 60,000-square-foot building sits on a hilltop above the mammoth old mill complex by the Naugatuck River on Main Street in downtown Ansonia.

"It's the bridge between the old and the new," said Paul Lloyd, business unit director. "The reason why we like to be overlooking our old facilities is, there are 169 years of history there. It's important to us."

Lloyd said the new building, which houses Farrel Pomini's continuous compounding machinery business, was an investment of more than $10 million by the German parent, L. Possehl & Co. GmbH, an industrial conglomerate.

The building features an open layout with plenty of areas for coworkers to meet. Next to the office area are a lab and 40,000 square feet of manufacturing space with nine assembly bays — all air-conditioned. The equipment can be run in each of the bays, as opposed to the old building, where crews had to jockey machines to a single test power station.

The old mill building downtown was so big that people had their own offices. Lloyd said they would email each other.

"There was no conversation. There was no creativity. What we wanted to do was to develop an environment which allowed our employees to work together and be creative and effective," he said.

Farrel Pomini moved into its new digs in September. Its 85 employees focus on compounding lines for plastics. The batch mixing machinery, for the rubber industry, moved to Topeka, Kan.

Ansonia houses all of Farrel Pomini's U.S.-based employees, except for one salesperson. Employees in the new plant do everything from research and development, engineering, manufacturing and assembly, remanufacturing and after-sales support.

"The idea of the entire building is to being the employees together, whether they be traditional blue-collar manufacturing workers, engineers or administrators — it's that they all have a part to play in the business," Lloyd said. Before, different departments were across the street from each other.

You can walk outside and sit in Adirondack chairs — or even use the small putting green — and look over the hill for a good view of the original Farrel works, which cover several hundred thousand square feet. The operation dated to the 1840s as a foundry and also as an equipment maker for the burgeoning rubber industry. That was where Fernley H. Banbury, a British engineer who had moved to the United States, developed his famous mixer in 1916. The Banbury Mixer became the gold standard for rubber mixing.

In 1963, the company got into the plastics sector with its Farrel Continuous Mixer.

Pomini has a similar long history, as the Italian company was founded in 1886 to make equipment used in cotton manufacturing. Pomini began building equipment for rubber and plastics in 1949.

The German company bought Pomini in 2007 and then Farrel in 2008. Both machinery makers were integrated into the Harburg-Freudenberger Maschinenbau GmbH business, also part of Possehl. In 2010, the three became HF Mixing Group.

Lloyd said HF was Farrel's largest competitor on the rubber equipment side.

"It's no secret. Where people were looking when they made this acquisition was the rubber business, particularly the Banbury Mixer," he said.

But Lloyd said that when the German owners looked at the total company, and re-evaluated their outlook, they saw that Farrel Pomini has a substantial business in plastics equipment, he said.

"And although it wasn't core to their acquisition strategy, it was interesting to them on the basis that was a potential growth business," Lloyd said. "So from that point forward, we started to develop the business and move the business forward from there."

It's paying off. Lloyd said Farrel Pomini's business has been growing 10 to 15 percent over the past five years.

Getting bought by a major competitor can create anxiety for employees. But Lloyd — himself a Farrel employee since becoming an apprentice at 16 in his native United Kingdom — recalled that the German owners delivered a consistent message: Farrel Pomini was an important part of a growth strategy. "And they made a commitment at that point in time, to keep the business in Connecticut, and if at all possible, in Ansonia," he said.

It proved a difficult task. They looked for a building in Ansonia and other nearby towns in Connecticut. Nothing.

So Farrel Pomini officials met with the Ansonia council and a developer. Ansonia leaders had wanted an industrial park, and they hit on the hilltop area overlooking the city. There was just one problem: a gigantic rock formation that had to be blasted away.

"Wherever you see building, it used to be rock. And the rock was taller than the building you see today," Lloyd said. Part of the rock remains on one side of the building.

The city built a road to the site.

It took a lot of work to prepare the challenging site. Lloyd said that shows the machinery company did not have a lot of other choices and demonstrated the strength of the commitment to stay in Ansonia. "It really was a kept promise," he said.

Now Ansonia is going to move some police and administrators into Farrel's old main office building.

Compounding lines typically use twin-screw extruders. Farrel Pomini's compounding systems for plastics use a two-stage process, as a continuous mixer feeds a single-screw extruder, which builds pressure as the material goes through the pelletizer. Mixing and extrusion are separate functions.

The mixer has two rotors that are counter-rotating and non-intermeshing. Lloyd said it's based on the Banbury Mixer principle, imparting shear between the wings and the chamber. A valve at the bottom of the mixing area can be adjusted to make more intensive mixing action, or less, before the material drops into the single-screw extruder.

The length-to-diameter ratio of each rotor is just 6-1. That gives the system a lot of free volume, with large clearances between the two rotors, and does efficient mixing.

"That means that the mixer is very, very good at highly loaded products," Lloyd said. "It's very, very good at temperature-sensitive products. And it's very, very good at products where long heat history is a problem." It also handles a high degree of loading of materials like colorants, titanium, dioxide and carbon black.

That translates into polyolefins, such as polyethylene, polypropylene. Other areas include biopolymers, PET, nylon and PVC.

Farrel Pomini's core business is compounders or masterbatch makers. The capacity of the Compact Processor machines — with everything mounted on the same frame, pre-wired and pre-piped — goes up to 10,000 pounds an hour.

For larger-output systems, with rotors up to 18 inches in diameter, the company sells the mixer and extruder as separate items, Lloyd said. The giant lines go to resin manufacturers and petrochemical companies.

Lloyd said the basic process is the same: The feed rate of material going into the mixer is the only thing that determines the output rate of the extruder and the pelletizer. "So this becomes a very versatile, flexible system," he said.

That versatility is a big selling point, according to Lloyd. Compounding attracts startups, companies with new ways to target what can be a highly customized, shorter-run market for materials. "It is possible for somebody to come up with an idea, develop a product, buy a 2,000-pound-per-hour machine and run a business on it. And those people are quite attractive to us," he said.

Lloyd said Farrel Pomini wants to take a leadership role in biopolymers, now a niche area, but one he said will surely continue to grow.

But he said employees know the value of looking back to Farrel's important history: "If you walk around the old factory now… it's eerie. But it does kind of bring a little lump to your throat, when you see it, and know the stories and some of things that went on there."

And Farrel Pomini's strength comes from that history and the ability to bring that knowledge into what the company does today, in its flashy new building, he said.

"History is very important to us," Lloyd said. "The future's the future. That's what happens next, and we have to focus on that. But we can't forget what brought us here."