How would you spend a windfall of $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million added to your operating budget? Here’s what owners and managers of plastics plants said they would do with this dream cash.
When you look at competing claims for gravimetric batch blenders, the issue is accuracy. Virtually all makers of the equipment claim similar accuracy, but the numbers appear to mean different things to different people. You need to know what counts for you and how to test accuracy with your own resin and regrind.
Thanks to recent technical advances, relatively inexpensive capacitance thickness gauges reportedly are now stable enough for reliable closed-loop control, not just monitoring thickness variations. Another big step forward for capacitance gauges is the arrival of non-contact heads that can be mounted on the bubble instead of farther downstream on the layflat, thereby allowing quicker response to thickness variations.
Some safety errors violate OSHA regulations. Some simply defy common sense. After studying the records of hundreds of accidents, Plastics Technology uncovered the most dangerous practices in plastics plants. Are you guilty of these 10 deadly mistakes?
Fly ash, a silica and alumina residue collected from the chimneys of coal-fired power plants and incinerators, is both a waste product and a promising low-cost filler for plastics.
The overall safety record for plastics processing is nothing to brag about. Though injury rates are falling little by little, accidents in plastics plants remain well above the average for all U.S. manufacturing. In this special report, we turn the spotlight on the hazardous conditions that result in so many injuries.
A new method of recycling PET into pellets or directly into extruded sheet is said to save time and energy by combining crystallizing and drying with size reduction in one piece of equipment.
While twin-screws get most of the glory, a quiet revolution has been taking place in single-screw compounding. In the past six to 12 months, some half-dozen new dispersive mixing elements have gone into commercial production, and more are on the way.
