Borealis BorPEX underscores winning performance in football

Eight of the twelve German stadiums hosting this year's world football championships are benefiting from a pitch heating system based on BorPEX material from Borealis, a leading provider of innovative value creating plastics solutions. Rehau®, one of the most diversified plastic processors in the world, chose BorPEX for crosslinked polyethylene (PE-X) based pipes to prevent pitches from freezing during the winter. These tough and flexible pipes help prevent match postponements, eliminate the higher injury risk related to playing on hard, iced-up ground and accelerate the post-winter recovery of pitches. As a result of the installations, the German 2005/2006 football season was allowed to continue uninterrupted throughout the winter, finishing earlier than normal to assist preparations for the tournament.

As an additional plus for installation engineers, the combined flexibility and toughness of BorPEX improves handling of finished pipes and allows for straight-forward, fast installation according to specific pitch design requirements. Continuous production using the peroxide crosslinking (PE-Xa) process assists ease of production and ensures consistent, high-quality piping. The good high and low temperature performance of BorPEX reduces the potential for pipe stiffness during winter, making installation easier and preventing any damage to the pipe itself both during installation and when under the ground surface.

Thorsten Wiggenhagen, Team Leader for Rehau's sub-surface heating/cooling business, confirms the success of the pitch heating system: "Our sports ground system delivers ideal playing conditions and has proven highly successful in practice, having demonstrated its reliability in more than 200,000 m2 of installations around the world to date. We chose BorPEX for our system because of the highly durable yet flexible characteristics it gives to PE-X piping, ensuring long-term operation at both high and low temperatures, and ease of installation."

Norbert Jansen, Application Marketing Manager for Borealis' pipe business, adds: "The success of Borealis' BorPEX product range for the manufacture of high quality PE-X pipes can be attributed in part to its coverage of all three commercial crosslinking technologies - peroxide, irradiation and silane crosslinking. The specific tailoring of our products to meet each technology means that efficient pipe production and superior pipe quality can be achieved which, as demonstrated by our pipe solutions for Rehau, helps our customers meet the demanding requirements of numerous international standards and regulations."