Chukyo Yushi is a manufacturer of processing aids and additives such as mold-releasing agents for the polyurethane foam seats for automobiles, the coating agents for thermal paper, and the mold lubricants for print-circuit phenol substrates.
"Hidorin," a lubricating and waterproofing agent used on various types of thermal paper such as fax paper, receipts printed at cash registers, and air tickets, is a quite unique product that uniformly disperses extremely waterrepellent lubricating components in water in the form of ultrafine particles to the order of microns. Chukyo Yushi supplies these products to most of the thermal paper manufacturers around the World, with more than a 60% share of the World market and an 80% share of the Japanese market.
Another main product of Chukyo Yushi is "Rikeizai", a mold-releasing agent for polyurethane foam molded products, which is indispensable to smoothly separate polyurethane products, such as seats and steering wheels, from the molds for automobile interior parts. The company's mold-releasing agents, based on the company's original formulas, contribute to giving these parts a good cushion quality and an excellent texture. The company enjoys more than a 60% share of the domestic market.

Until recently, mold-releasing agents for automotive polyurethane seats used gasoline, toluene, xylene, and chlorine-based volatile organic compounds (VOC's). With the very strict environmental regulations on VOC's in Europe and the United States, about 45% in the U.S. and 20% in Europe of mold lubricants have been switched to aqueous products. In Japan, however, the percentage of use of aqueous releasing agents still stays very low, at around 5%, because it is very difficult to develop an aqueous releasing agent as water reacts easily to raw materials of polyurethane and produces negative effects on the surface conditions of molded products.
To solve this problem, Chukyo Yushi firstly improved the quality of the wax, the actual releasing ingredients of aqueous releasing agents, and then developed a surface-active agent that disperses wax in water. These developments succeeded in creating an aqueous mold-releasing agent that is free of VOC's but one having a performance equivalent to solvent-based mold-releasing agents. The company plans to propose the use of this VOC-free technology to various industries to help them add valuable functions to their products, to improve production efficiency, and to develop environmental solutions.
To separate things, to lubricate things, and to make things water-repellent? these are all low-profile functions, but they are indispensable to the manufacture of high-quality, advanced products. Chukyo Yushi supports the World's manufacturing industries with its proprietary blending technologies.