Norplex-Micarta Company Profile
About Norplex-Micarta.
Norplex-Micarta is a leading manufacturing manufacturer of high performance thermoset composite materials based on impregnation and lamination technology.
Norplex-Micarta manufactures the highest quality specialty sheet products, prepregs, rods, molded shapes, and tubes to meet demanding applications for OEMs and fabricators around the world.
The global headquarters of Norplex-Micarta is located in Postville, Iowa, USA. To support the demand for thermoset composite materials in Asia, the Company also operates a facility in Changzhou, Jiangsu, P.R. China. Customers outside of mainland China are serviced by a trade offices located in Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Norplex-Micarta is a subsidiary of Industrial Dielectrics Holdings, Inc. Industrial Dielectrics Holdings has two primary lines of business. The first is the Norplex-Micarta line of products. The second is IDI Composite International, which produces various thermoset molding compounds in the USA, Puerto Rico, Mexico, UK, France, and China.
Norplex-Micarta was formed in 2003, when Norplex purchased Micarta to form North America’s largest manufacturer of industrial laminate materials. Both the Norplex and Micarta have long histories. Micarta was the original brand name created by George Westinghouse for products based on Leo Baekeland’s phenolic resin discovery. In 1913, Micarta was sold for the first time outside of the Westinghouse group of companies. In 1945, Norplex was formed in Wisconsin, USA. In 1975, the demand for industrial laminates had grown substantially, and the laminates factory in Postville, Iowa was opened. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, both Norplex and Micarta made significant innovations in laminate materials. By the time the two companies merged in 2003, the product lines had expanded to include epoxy, phenolic, melamine, silicone and other thermoset resins in sheet, tube, rod, and molded shape forms.
Currently, the Postville, Iowa, USA facility employees 180 people and operates 5 days a week, 24 hours per day. This 13,000 square meter facility has 6 processing lines to produce prepreg and various pressing and tube manufacturing equipment.
The Changzhou, Jiangsu, China facility employees 60 people and operates 5 days a week, 16 to 20 hours per day. Focused on glass epoxy materials, this 10,000 square meter facility has two processing lines to produce prepreg, two press lines, and several different fabrication work centers.
Over 70% of the material produced by Norplex-Micarta is made to customer specifications.
From the global headquarters in the USA, the Company works directly with OEMs and other consumers of composite materials to develop new materials in order to solve unique challenges. Research and development projects have produced new generations of products such as tubes that can withstand the high temperature and stress environment in down hole oil and gas applications and unique worker protection devices in the electrical engineering field.
Working with new resin and reinforcements, as well as novel combinations of these materials, Norplex-Micarta develops several new materials annually to serve in some of the most demanding applications in the industry.