Materials Know How
Polymer Science for Those Who Work With Plastic — Part 1: The Repeat Unit
What are the basic building blocks of plastics and how do they affect the processing of that material and its potential applications in the real world? Meet the repeat unit.
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Part 3: The World of Molding Thermosets
Thermosets were the prevalent material in the early history of plastics, but were soon overtaken by thermoplastics in injection molding applications.
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Let's Take a Journey Into the World of Thermosets: Part 2
Most thermoset molding processes still treat the mold like a black box where the curing process is invisible and mysterious, and nobody knows what is happening to the material until the mold opens. That just isn’t so.
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Let's Take a Journey into the World of Molding Thermosets – Part 1
There are many fundamental differences between thermosets and thermoplastics, from the way raw materials are furnished to the molder and the process in which parts are molded.
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Fundamentals of Polyethylene – Part 6: PE Performance
Don’t assume you know everything there is to know about PE because it’s been around so long. Here is yet another example of how the performance of PE is influenced by molecular weight and density.
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Fundamentals of Polyethylene – Part 5: Metallocenes
How the development of new catalysts—notably metallocenes—paved the way for the development of material grades never before possible.
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Polyethylene Fundamentals – Part 4: Failed HDPE Case Study
Injection molders of small fuel tanks learned the hard way that a very small difference in density — 0.6% — could make a large difference in PE stress-crack resistance.
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Unraveling the Science and Myth Associated With Moisture Analysis — Part 2
Once you’ve selected the right moisture analyzer, the task of method development begins. Don’t skip this step or you’ll run into problems. Here’s what happened in my lab decades ago.
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Fundamentals of Polyethylene – Part 3: Field Failures
Polyethylene parts can fail when an inappropriate density is selected. Let’s look at some examples and examine what happened and why.
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The Fundamentals of Polyethylene – Part 2: Density and Molecular Weight
PE properties can be adjusted either by changing the molecular weight or by altering the density. While this increases the possible combinations of properties, it also requires that the specification for the material be precise.
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