New systems to process mixed plastic waste and to upgrade it with fiberglass or wood flour were prominent at last June’s show in Chicago. Single-shaft rotary grinders made a strong showing as newer alternatives to conventional granulators and shredders.
Several dryers introduced at NPE 2000 in Chicago in June offer new technologies that claim to be several orders of magnitude more efficient than conventional hot-air dryers with desiccant beds.
Compounding news at NPE included a wealth of new batch and continuous machines to mix in high loadings of wood flour, glass fiber, carbon black, and more exotic fillers. One new batch mixer can melt blend wood-flour compounds without the need for an extruder or continuous mixer. A number of new pelletizers were also introduced.
While most of the new granulators shown at NPE 2000 last month were beside-the-press models, there was also an accent on larger units with an appetite for tough hunks of large-diameter PVC pipe, bundles of textile fibers, and wads of molten bottle flash. Many are configured for “difficult” resins from engineering types to soft TP elastomers.
NPE will show higher outputs of practically everything, as advances in grooved feeds, servo drives, screw torque, mixing screws, dies, and downstream cooling, cutting, and handling make everything run faster. Running faster in turn requires a higher level of control, or you can just make a whole lot more bad product faster.
From pneumatic systems that deliver materials to the processing machine to conveyors and handling devices that pull parts out the back, the trend appears to be “smaller and smarter.”
U.S. processors still have some catching up to do when it comes to getting the most out of grooved-feed extruders. But decades of European experience offer lessons on how to use grooved feeds to run even resins like TPU, nylon, and PET.
Cyclic olefin homopolymers and copolymers are engineering thermoplastics derived from the ring-shaped norbornene molecule, which is made from dicyclopentadiene (DCPD) and ethylene.
Here’s a novel approach to the rapidly developing field of micro-molding. It’s a variation on two-stage injection—but with an in-line screw and plunger combination that delivers shot weights from 0.1 to 4.5 grams.
