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AV's Plant
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Australian Vinyls Corporation has the capacity to produce 140,000 tonnes annually of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) resin at its Laverton plant, to the west of Melbourne in Victoria.
We manufacture a range of PVC resin grades suitable for all significant applications in Australia.
The essential raw material for PVC production, vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), is shipped to Corio, Victoria from overseas. From Corio, road tankers transport the liquid VCM to storage tanks at Laverton.
AV produces the polymer PVC by the suspension polymerisation process. During suspension polymerisation, the monomer VCM is dispersed in water in a reactor (autoclave), together with an initiator and a surfactant or suspension agent.
At Laverton, we operate six reactors around the clock. Each of the batches in the six autoclaves may be at a different stage of the process at any one time.
The stainless steel-lined vessels are designed to withstand pressure of around 2000 kPa. Each autoclave is equipped with a cooling jacket which allows cold water to control temperature during reaction. The autoclaves are hydrochloric acid (HCl) resistant because a trace of HCl is also produced during polymerisation.
The Laverton plant is designed to recover unconverted VCM by degassing and stripping the PVC slurry. The VCM is recovered for reuse.
The next phase is Drying where most of the water is removed in centrifuges – machines that use centrifugal force to separate the free water from the PVC. Water from inside the porous grains is removed in fluidised-bed dryers.
The final resin product is then stored in silos. The capacity of AV’s ten silos is 5500 tonnes. Around 80% of the resin product is dispatched to customers in bulk road tankers. The remainder is packed into bags in our warehouse before dispatch.
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