Gerlach Maschinenbau celebrates world premiere of VulcaRAMix at the Global Polymer Summit

Louisville, KY — Gerlach Maschinenbau GmbH will present VulcaRAMix for the first time worldwide at the Global Polymer Summit (GPS) Expo in Louisville, Kentucky. The cloud-based simulation platform can be seen live at booth 621 on September 29 and 30.
Bringing a new profile or a new compound onto a continuous curing line today usually means one thing: trial runs. Line time is tied up, material is scrapped, measurements are taken and settings adjusted — often over several days. The right settings depend in a non-linear way on the profile geometry, the compound and the configuration of the line, so experience alone becomes unreliable with every new combination. At the same time, the data needed to predict the process — rheometer curves, thermal conductivities, dielectric properties — are frequently scattered across PDFs and paper files.
VulcaRAMix moves this work from the line to the screen. Users store their compounds with thermal, dielectric and cure properties, define the cross-section of the product — as a parametric shape, as a free contour, from a DXF file or even from a photo with automatic contour recognition — and assemble a digital twin of their actual line from individual modules such as hot air, microwave, infrared and cooling. Mono- and co-extruded profiles with several compounds can be modeled.
The physics engine then calculates how the profile heats up and cures along the entire line: over time, through its depth and at every position. For routine questions, a fast 1D approximation is used; where belt contact, orientation or airflow make the difference, VulcaRAMix automatically switches to a direction-resolved 2D calculation. The result is a complete temperature and cure profile, including the target cure time and an automatic alert when the permissible material temperature is exceeded.
A key design principle is transparency. Every model in VulcaRAMix is documented with its formula, symbols, units, assumptions and source, and approximations are clearly labeled as such. Cure kinetics are based on a method calibrated at RWTH Aachen University and can be re-calibrated automatically from the user’s own rheometer curves; heat-transfer correlations for hot air are calibrated against Gerlach’s own measurement program.
Beyond the calculation itself, VulcaRAMix serves as a central knowledge base. Compounds, profiles and line layouts are stored in a searchable database with versioning, an approval workflow, roles and permissions, and graduated visibility from private to company-wide. The platform is multi-tenant, available in English and German, and runs in the browser as well as on iOS and Android devices.
VulcaRAMix Media Kit · GPS Expo 2026 · Booth 621
Gerlach Maschinenbau GmbH · www.vulcaramix.com · Page 7
VulcaRAMix is aimed at profile, hose and seal extruders who want to shorten the start-up of new articles, rubber compounders who release compounds based on reliable cure data, manufacturers of curing lines who design lines and demonstrate their performance to customers, and R&D and process engineering teams who want to investigate new product-and-line combinations virtually before the first sample run.
Visitors to the GPS Expo can see VulcaRAMix live at booth 621 and discuss their own applications with the development team. Registration is open at www.vulcaramix.com.