Summary Sustainable plastic production offers numerous benefits – environmental harm reduction, consumer satisfaction, demonstrating brand values, and staying ahead of government regulations. The plastics industry is embracing sustainability in every step of plastic design, production, use, and recycling. As these eco-friendly methods become more sophisticated, they will become cheaper and more efficient, thus further enhancing…
Summary Although mechanical recycling is the dominant technology today, it is not enough to meet the plastic industry’s growing sustainability needs. Mechanical recycling requires high-quality, clean, and sorted recycled waste, which is only a small fraction of all recycled plastic. The products of mechanical recycling often have degraded properties compared to virgin polymers. In contrast,…
Summary In recent years, biopolymers have risen to the forefront of discussions on sustainability in plastics. Biopolymers, both bio-sourced and biodegradable, offer the promise of being more environmentally friendly than virgin, single-use feedstock. However, biopolymers offer varying degrees of sustainability as well as unique challenges for plastic processors and manufacturers. Replacing traditional polyolefins with biopolymers…
Overview The ability of a material to store and transfer heat is characterized with the material properties of thermal diffusivity, thermal conductivity, and specific heat capacity. Understanding these properties is critical when exposing a material to a wide array of temperature environments: large gradients, rapid changes, and maintaining stability, to name a few. Accurate…
Plastics are versatile, lightweight, and fundamental to countless products, but plastic waste poses a growing environmental threat. The plastics industry are confronting sustainability demands from consumers, brand owners, and regulations with bold innovation in material design and recycling. The leading technologies and areas of exploration in polymer sustainability are mechanical recycling, advanced recycling, biobased polymers,…
Overview Polymeric materials, both thermoplastics and thermosets, have long been studied by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Cure properties, crystallization behavior, and glass transition temperatures are just a few of the material characteristics investigated by this versatile thermal technique. In many instances, the comparison of these material properties from samples that have a different production…
Overview The viscoelastic properties of polymers play a critical role in the different stages of polymer processing operations, whether it is melting and extrusion or the performance of the final product. On most polymer data sheets, these properties are presented in the form of a melt flow index. However, this simplistic approach is inherently…
Overview Thermogravimetric Analysis, or TGA, is a powerful analytical tool for measuring changes in a sample’s mass as its environmental temperature shifts. When coupled with other instrumental techniques such as mass spectrometers and infrared spectrometers, chemical analysis of the evolved gases is achieved. These hyphenated techniques have a long history in thermal analysis.…
Designing New Materials for Additive Manufacturing: Vat Photopolymerization Overview 3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), provides opportunities to create previously unattainable geometric objects through layer-by-layer fabrication. Novel macromolecular structures and synthetic methods coupled with unique printing methods lead to 3D part generation with micron-scale resolution and tunable to emerging technologies. By tuning polymer structure, printing…
Chris Yakacki: Characterization of Active Shape-Memory Polymers The field of stimuli-sensitive polymers has grown rapidly over the past decade. Actively-moving polymers have gained attention and have been proposed for use in applications from shape-changing biomedical devices to morphing structures. This webinar covers the basics of characterizing shape-memory polymers using thermo-mechanical equipment, such as the Q800…
Troy Nickel: An Introduction to Fatigue Testing Material or structural failures are typically the result of two types of loading modes: a single (static) load that results in failure or a repeated (cyclic) load that causes the material or structure to fatigue over time. When designing materials or structures it is important to understand which…
