best practices
Follow These Tips to Give Your Granulator Blades the Edge
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions—and troubleshooting advice—to help you maintain your granulator blades.
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Get Better at Quoting Injection Molded Parts: Part 3
Follow these detailed tips to get the jobs you want. This installment focuses on the mold and the molding machine.
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Use Rheology and Flow Simulation to Troubleshoot Extrusion Processes
Let’s take the mystery out of rheology by showing how the wealth of information it provides can be used by processors to solve real-world production problems.
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General-Purpose Screws on the Comeback?
They are being specified more often for recycling applications to increase flexibility. But there is still no such thing as a GP screw and recyclers need to consider other processing approaches.
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November 2020’s Most-Viewed Articles
These articles garnered the most reader attention among stories posted in November 2020 by Plastics Technology: implementing automation, gauging residence time, the history of polymers and more.
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Troubleshooting Pressure Fluctuations in Piston-Type Melt Filters
Piston filtration offers many advantages over other systems. While pressure fluctuations could be regarded as their weakness, there are many ways to avoid them, both from the mechanical and the process side. Small adjustment can make a huge difference in the overall performance and efficiency of the system.
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How to Automate High-Precision ‘Micro’ Insert Molding
What does it take to automate a horizontal injection molding cell to handle micro-sized inserts and molded parts? General-purpose top-entry robots and tooling may not be up to the job.
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How to Plan and Implement Automation in an Injection Molding Plant
There is no “one size fits all” solution in automation. When considering what it would look like in your plant, hone in on the staff, products, space, and goals that are specific to you and the automation system that you will be installing.
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Residence Time and Residence-Time Distribution—Part 1 of 2
Failing to calculate and accurately account for residence time can compromise material integrity before it’s even injected.
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Injection Molding: Understand the Link Between Feed Throat Temperature & Bridging
Save time and money by properly controlling the feed-throat temperature. In some cases—but not all—it can help you solve a bridging problem.
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