polymerguru

  BASF Corporation is launching Butyl acrylate RE and 2-Ethylhexylacrylate RE ( #RenewableElectricity ), two new products that are manufactured at BASF’s Freeport, Texas site with attributed electricity from renewable sources. This reduces CO2 emissions in the manufacturing process and improves the products’ carbon footprint compared to conventionally produced acrylic acid esters.   For products with the suffix “RE”, renewable electricity generated from wind and solar sources in Texas was attributed to the RE products to replace 100% of their consumption at the Freeport site.   Butyl acrylate RE and 2-Ethylhexylacrylate RE by #BASF are completely equivalent to their conventionally produced counterparts in terms of quality and performance and can be used in a wide variety of #polymerdispersion applications, with the #coatings and #adhesives industries as the primary target industries.   Avery Dennison Corporation has successfully pioneered the commercialization of...

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share Twin-screw extruders, workhorses in compounding for over a century, are often misunderstood. Here are five common myths and misperceptions that can create scaleup and manufacturing challenges. Myth 1: TSE performance is always very sensitive to wear. Twin-screw extruders are generally less sensitive to wear than single-screw extruders due to self-wiping effects and positive forward conveying. Wear is often localized, with a rough rule of thumb allowing up to 3-5% wear on screw elements' OD. Myth 2: A twin-screw vent stuffer always fixes a vent flow problem. Vent stuffers are useful for polymer formulations with unmelt material that tends to accumulate in the vent due to high vapor velocities, but they do not address issues from non-optimized screw design or backups in the pumping zone. Myth 3: You can scale any process from lab to commercial in one step. The comparative surface-to-volume ratios of small to large TSEs make scaling challenging, particularl...

𝐓𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲'𝐬 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖𝐋𝐄𝐃𝐆𝐄 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐧 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐈𝐧𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞: Short shots Sink Marks Burn Marks Flash But in my experience, warpage is the most difficult one. WHY? Because warpage is rarely caused by a single parameter. Most of the time it is the result of several factors interacting at the same time: Part design Resin shrinkage behavior Mold cooling Balance Gate location Packing pressure distribution Residual stresses during filling and cooling And very often the root cause is not in the process, that is why preventing warpage must start early: ✔ Plastic part design review ✔ Mold flow analysis ✔ Cooling system design ✔ Gate location evaluation Injection molding is not only about processing plastic. It is about understanding the interaction between design, material, tooling and process. In my experience, the earlier the process engineer is involved, the easier it is to...