Avient to Present a Broad Array of Innovative and Sustainable Materials Solutions at Chinaplas 2025

Avient Corporation, an innovator of materials solutions, will showcase its portfolio of advanced and sustainable products and services and host three technical seminars at Chinaplas 2025. The annual event is Asia’s leading technology-oriented plastics and rubber trade fair dedicated to helping designers, brand owners, and manufacturers boost the performance, aesthetics, efficiency, and sustainability of their products.

Avient will also showcase the following engineered materials:

reSound™ REC Recycled Content Thermoplastic Elastomers (TPEs): based on post-consumer recycle (PCR) for reduced carbon footprint

Versaflex™ TPEs: can reduce vibration in consumer goods such as household appliances and power tools by up to 80% compared to traditional thermoplastic vulcanizates (TPVs)

NEU™ Custom Capabilities and NEUSoft™ Thermoplastics Polyurethanes (TPUs): a series of ultra-soft TPUs for short-term in-vivo applications that are available in custom colors with excellent ultraviolet (UV) stability and barrier properties, offer good elasticity, resistance to abrasions and tears, barrier properties, and melt strength for use in catheter applications, including cardiovascular, intravenous, and other specialty segments 

OnFlex™ TPEs: offer high thermal, chemical, and mechanical property profiles with low odor for demanding applications in transportation, including OnFlex AF 7210-70 for automotive components with low volatile organic compounds (VOCs), low fog, and lower density compared to previous material grades, plus excellent low-gloss surface finish and soft touch for high-quality aesthetics

PREPERM™ Low-Loss Dielectric Thermoplastics: developed for telecommunication applications, such as lightweight 5G antennas, with controlled dielectric performance and low transmission losses

Chinaplas 2025 will be held from April 15th to 18th at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center. Visitors are invited to explore and discuss Avient’s latest innovations at its two sponsorship locations: the TechTalk Show Area (Hall 16, Booth R11) and the SportsTech Chic + Green Gallery (Hall 20, Booth L61).

source:Avient

BASF and WAL Low Carbon Technology co-create advanced plastic air tank for commercial vehicles

Key Highlights:

First plastic air tank for commercial vehicles made with BASF’s high-performance Ultramid® polyamide.

Air tank up to 20% lower in weight compared to aluminum alternatives

At CHINAPLAS 2025, BASF will showcase a commercial vehicle air tank co-created with WAL Low Carbon Technology (Anhui) Co. Ltd (WAL) and made with BASF's high-performance material solution Ultramid® polyamide.

The innovative solution achieves a weight reduction of 10-20% compared to aluminum alternatives and over 50% compared to steel versions.

Production of the air tank is also more energy efficient, since it only needs a one-piece injection molding process. This eliminates the need for secondary welding operations that are typically required for metal versions.

“Lightweighting of vehicles contributes to energy efficiency, which lowers fuel consumption and carbon emissions. The successful collaboration with BASF on this air tank project strengthens our position as a technology leader in the commercial vehicle components industry and enables us to better serve our customers’ needs for high-performance and sustainable solutions,” said Karl Song, Chief Technology Officer of WAL Low Carbon Technology.

Owing to the superior mechanical properties of BASF’s innovative material solution Ultramid, the air tank exhibits exceptional rigidity, welding line strength and UV resistance. Combined with its high burst pressure resistance of above 50 bar (5MPa), the solution demonstrates consistent product quality and reliability in this demanding application.

“The co-creation with WAL demonstrates our ability to meet demanding high-pressure applications. This also validates the potential of our material solution to meet other automotive applications where high burst pressure resistance is required.

source:BASF

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : Study shows filler defects can enhance polymer's thermal conductivity

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

New Study Reveals Polymers with Flawed Fillers Boost Heat Transfer in Plastics:

In the quest to design the next generation of materials for modern devices -ones that are lightweight, flexible and excellent at dissipating heat – a team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst made a discovery: imperfection has its upsides. 

This research, published in Science Advances, experimentally and theoretically found that polymers (commonly referred to as plastics) made with thermally conductive fillers containing defects performed 160% better than those with perfect fillers. This counterintuitive finding challenges long-held assumptions that defects compromise material performance. Instead, it points to a promising new strategy for engineering polymer composites with ultrahigh thermal conductivity.

The study was led by UMass Amherst with collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Stanford University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and Rice University.

Polymers have revolutionized modern devices with their unmatched lightness, electrical insulation, flexibility and ease of processing – qualities metals and ceramics simply can’t rival. Polymers are embedded in every corner of our tech landscape, from high-speed microchips and LEDs to smartphones and soft robotics. However, common polymers are thermal insulators with low thermal conductivity, which can lead to overheating issues. Their inherent insulating properties trap heat, spawning dangerous hot spots that sap performance and accelerate wear, heightening the risk of catastrophic failures and even fires.

For years, scientists have attempted to enhance the thermal conductivity of polymers by incorporating highly thermally conductive fillers such as metals, ceramics or carbon-based materials. The logic is straightforward: blending in thermally conductive fillers should improve overall performance. 

However, in practice, it is not this simple. Consider a polymer blended with diamonds.

Given a diamond’s exceptional thermal conductivity of about 2,000 watts per meter per kelvin (W m-1 K-1), a polymer that is composed of 40% diamond filler might theoretically achieve conductivity of around 800 W m-1 K-1. Yet, practical results have fallen short due to challenges like filler clumping, defects, high contact resistance between polymers and fillers, and low thermal conductivity of polymer matrices, which undermine heat transfer. 

“Understanding thermal transport mechanisms in polymeric materials has been a long-standing challenge, partly due to the complicated polymer structures, ubiquitous defects, and disorders,” says Yanfei Xu, UMass Amherst assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and corresponding author of the paper.

For their study, aimed at laying the foundation for understanding thermal transport in polymeric materials and controlling heat transfer across heterogeneous interfaces, the team created two polymer composites of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) – one incorporating perfect graphite fillers and the other using defective graphite oxide fillers, each at a low 5% volume fraction.

As expected, the perfect fillers on their own were more thermally conductive than imperfect ones.

“We measured perfect fillers (graphite) on their own have high thermal conductivity of roughly 292.55 W m-1 K-1 compared to only 66.29 W m-1 K-1 for defective ones (graphite oxide) on their own – a nearly fivefold difference,” says Yijie Zhou, the lead author and a mechanical engineering graduate student at UMass Amherst. 

However, surprisingly, when these fillers are added into polymers, polymers made with graphite oxide fillers containing defects performed 160% better than those with perfect graphite fillers. 

The team used a combination of experiments and models – thermal transport measurements, neutron scattering, quantum mechanical modeling, and molecular dynamics simulations – to study how defects influence thermal transport in polymer composites. 

They found that defective fillers facilitate more efficient heat transfer because their uneven surfaces don’t allow the polymer chains to pack together as tightly as the perfectly smooth fillers do. This unexpected effect, known as enhanced vibrational couplings between the polymers and defective fillers at the polymer/filler interfaces, boosts thermal conductivity and reduces resistance, making the material more efficient at transferring heat. 

“Defects, at times, act as bridges, enhancing the coupling across the interface and enabling better heat flow,” says Jun Liu, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University. “Indeed, imperfection can sometimes lead to better outcomes.” 

Xu believes these results, both experimental and theoretical, lay the groundwork for engineering new polymeric materials with ultrahigh thermal conductivity. These advanced present new opportunities for devices – from high-performance microchips to next-generation soft robotics – to operate cooler and more efficiently through improved heat dissipation.

Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : mechanical properties of carbonized phenolic resins

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

Effect of post-curing on the mechanical properties of carbonized phenolic resins

After curing, phenol-formaldehyde resins were post-cured at 160°C, 230°C, and 300°C in air for several hours, and then those post-cured samples were carbonized at 1000°C. The effect of post-curing on the physical properties and microstructure of the carbonized phenolic resin is reported in this article. The purpose of post-curing was to improve the mechanical properties of the carbonized resins. The post-curing process promoted the crosslinking reaction and the evolution of gases. The cured resin post-cured at a higher post-curing temperature (300°C) had a significantly higher weight loss, greater linear shrinkage and lower density than other samples. During carbonization the post-curing process not only decreased the weight loss but also limited the shrinkage. Post-curing also promoted the formation of carbon basal planes and the chemical densification in structures of the final carbonized resins. The increase in post-curing temperature and time had the effect of reducing the linear shrinkage of the resin during carbonization. The TGA thermal analysis showed that the post-cured resins improved the total weight loss more than 15 wt% over the unpost-cured resin. The carbonized resins developed from the post-cured resins had a greater flexural modulus by about 10–50% and improved the linear shrinkage by about 10% over that developed from unpost-cured resins.

source :Tse-Hao Ko, Tsu-Sheng Ma

#phenolicresin

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : Svante August Arrhenius-Nobel Prize 1903

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

Svante August Arrhenius-Nobel Prize 1903

This Swedish physical chemist is best known for his theory of electrolytic dissociation in aqueous solution, first presented for his doctorate thesis at the University of Uppsala when he was 24. The idea that oppositely charged ions resulting from dissociation of molecules could be present in the same solution initially met a hostile reception, but with support from Ostwald, van't Hoff and others the theory was gradually accepted.

Arrhenius was able to demonstrate the effect of electrolytic dissociation on osmotic pressure, lowering the freezing point, and increasing the boiling point of solutions containing electrolytes.

He then examined the relationship between toxins and antitoxins, their importance in relation to biological problems such as serum therapy, digestion and absorption, as well as gastric and pancreatic juices. The great importance of electrolytic dissociation theory is universally accepted today, even if some modifications have been found necessary.

Arrhenius also applied physicochemical principles to the study of meteorology, cosmology, and biochemistry. In meteorology, he predicted the scientific conclusion that increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause global warming.

Svante Arrhenius made important contributions to our understanding of the greenhouse effect and the role of greenhouse gases in Earth’s climate. In 1896, he published an article entitled “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,”which suggested that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by human activities could lead to global warming.

Arrhenius suggested that the carbon dioxide, water vapor and other gases in the Earth’s atmosphere acted like a greenhouse by trapping heat from the sun and preventing it from escaping back into space. He calculated that doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could raise global temperatures by up to 5-6 degrees Celsius.

He is also known for the Arrhenius Equation k = A exp -E/RT, which describes the effect of temperature on reaction rates. He was instrumental in establishing physical chemistry as a separate discipline. A man of eclectic scientific interests, he later published papers on immunology, cosmology and geology. He was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Source:turkchem.net/chemistry.msu.net

Follow: http://polymerguru.blogspot.com

#chemistry #electrolyte #greenhousegas #meteorology #

Transforming plastic waste into high-quality 3D-printed products

Every year, some 5.6 million metric tons of plastic packaging winds up in household waste in Germany after being used just once. So far, less than a third of it can be recycled. Working in partnership with Hochschule Bremen—City University of Applied Sciences, the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM aims to transform this waste into high-quality 3D-printed products.

Volumes of plastic waste are rising, having approximately tripled across Germany over the past 30 years. Packaging waste in particular is a major contributor to this. Where German households produced 2.1 million metric tons of plastic waste in 1994, the figure had risen to 5.6 million by 2023. That makes it even more important to find ways to recycle these single-use products, most of which are based on crude oil.

"But it is much harder to recycle post-consumer waste than plastic residue left over from industrial production," explains Dr. Silke Eckardt, a professor focusing on sustainable energy systems and resource efficiency at Hochschule Bremen—City University of Applied Sciences (HSB). After all, these materials are not only highly heterogeneous but generally also dirty.

To close the production cycle nevertheless, HSB has teamed up with researchers at Fraunhofer IFAM to recycle even these tough-to-handle plastics from private households and then put them to use in additive manufacturing.

Recycled plastic used in filaments for 3D printing

"Since the waste is supposed to be recycled for use in 3D printing, it has to meet very stringent requirements for aspects such as purity, shape and size," explains Dr. Dirk Godlinski, a project manager in the Composite Technology working group at Fraunhofer IFAM.

To this end, the polypropylene output from a sorting plant for packaging waste was used in a feasibility study conducted by HSB and Fraunhofer IFAM.

To ensure sufficient purity, Eckardt and her team processed the sorting plant output further: At the university's Laboratories for Circular Economy, they ground up the plastic, washed it and separated undesired material from the mainstream using a float-sink-separation. The team used near-infrared technology to identify residual foreign plastics and removed them subsequently. After that, the researchers ground down the material again until it had reached the grain size required for compounding and dried it. This method achieved purity levels of more than 99.8%.

Then Fraunhofer IFAM took over: "In the project, we produced homogeneous polypropylene from the prepared waste," Godlinski says. "This is a versatile form of plastic that is durable, resistant to breaking and relatively flexible."

The research scientist and his team produced a solid plastic strand. First, they processed the flakes of recycled polypropylene in an industrial extruder at Fraunhofer IFAM. The material was combined there, mixed using different extruder screw geometries, then melted at temperatures greater than 200 degrees Celsius and extruded.

"The expertise consists in precisely adjusting the various mechanical screws, temperatures, pressures and speeds along the production process so the final product is homogeneous polypropylene," Godlinski explains. For further processing in 3D printing, for example, the strand must be round and consistent in diameter over its entire length, with a smooth surface.

The researchers succeeded in this: The gray plastic strand, about two millimeters thick, was able to be used directly as a filament in a commercial 3D printer. By now, Godlinski and his team have successfully printed their first components, including caps.

This marks the conclusion of the feasibility study by HSB and Fraunhofer IFAM. The researchers are now optimizing the production process. Ideas for follow-up projects have already been floated. Godlinski notes that plastics can be further refined, for example, by introducing additives such as glass fibers during compounding. This makes it possible to produce even very high-quality components for use in fields such as aviation and the automotive industry.

source : Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM / Tech Xplore

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share :Warpage & Shrinkage

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

With glass fibers, shrinkage can be 10X lower in the flow direction than in the transverse direction.

This is the classical driving mechanism for warpage of GF filled compounds and most people will look at the ratio of perpendicular to parallel shrinkage as a sort of Warpage Index.

However, one can easily demonstrate that Warpage does NOT scale with this RATIO, but rather with the DIFFERENCE of perpendicular to parallel shrinkage.

This is crucial, because when you increase packing, you reduce both values (hence, their difference), but barely change the ratio.

And what we observe is that if you double the packing pressure, you roughly cut the warpage down by 50%, despite the anisotropy ratio remaining the same !

Packing is the single most effective way to reduce warpage in GF filled materials.

Credit:Vito leo