Jim Frankland

Jim Frankland President

The Three Causes of Screw Wear

You run the risk of wasting time and money by not understanding what’s causing your screws to wear.

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Extrusion

Extrusion: Solving Surging in Two-Stage Screws

This usually crops up when the two stages are not matched in output. The best solution is to install a pressure-adjusting valve at the discharge end of the extruder.

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best practices

Understanding the Effect of Polymer Viscosity on Melt Temperature

Every processor should get hold of the viscosity curves for the polymers they use or contemplate using in their operations, and learn how to read them.

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Extrusion: Evaluating Screw Design for Multi-Material Recycling

Since many plastic products are made of a combination of materials with very different melting points, careful consideration must be given to designing screws when it comes time to recycle these products.

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Medical

Extrusion: 'Melt-Blown' Fiber: What You Need to Know to Enter the Face Mask Market

Coronavirus pandemic has made extrusion processors curious about entering the face-mask market. But melt-blown fiber is very different from most other extrusion processes and requires specialized equipment.

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Extrusion

Extrusion: The Importance of Zone 1 Barrel Temperature

Tweaking the temperature settings of the first barrel zones may not yield the desired result. In fact, they may yield the opposite. Here’s why.

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screws

What You Should Know About Miniature Extrusion Screws

Very small screws have become more common with the growth of additive manufacturing. Designing such screws requires balancing their output requirements with their torque strength.

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Film Extrusion

Extrusion: Important Polymer Melting Equations for Extrusion Processors

The more you know about what happens in a screw, the more you’ll be able to work with your supplier to optimize design.

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Extrusion

Try This Lower-Cost Purging Method

You might be able to reduce purging times and save money by scheduling processing jobs in order of the increasing material viscosity. But to get started, you'll need shear rate/viscosity curves for your polymers.

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best practices

How to Optimize Usage of Recycled Material

Processors need to “engineer” feeding properties similar to virgin pellets into their regrind to efficiently and economically utilize more of their scrap.

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What You Need to Know to Get into Coextrusion

Key considerations range from determining the right extruder sizes to tooling, matching material viscosities, and lots more. Take a look.

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Try This Approach to Clean Up Your Recycled Material

CO2 can be used as a totally “green” solvent to remove many kinds of contamination in recycled plastics without the need for toxic solvents.

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