Know-How
TOOLING: Having Trouble with Lifters?
Lifters can cause tool maintenance, repair, and processing issues if not designed properly. Here we begin a series on how to avoid all this.
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EXTRUSION: Pellet Geometry Can Impact Output
A simple angle-of-repose experiment can help you determine how your pellets will feed.
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INJECTION MOLDING: Why Pellet Size and Shape Are Important
Uniformity is needed to help ensure melt quality.
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MATERIALS: Impact Testing: The Problems With Single-Point Data
Knowledge of test conditions and graphical data showing the course of the impact event can help provide engineers and designers with the information they need to make informed choices about material toughness.
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RECYCLING: Recycling’s ‘Vision’ of the Future
Optical sorting technology continues to help push advances in plastics recycling.
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EXTRUSION: Barrier Screws and Mixers
For some reason, there are a lot of barrier screws in operation with high-shear mixers, when a distributive mixer is usually a better choice.
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Understanding Machine vs. Plastic Variables
Why setup sheets, DOEs, validations, etc. may not yield the results they should.
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MATERIALS: The Problems with Single-Point Data
In plastics, notched Izod and Charpy test results have been complicated by the way they are reported.
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Extrusion: How to Adjust for Polymer Shrinkage and Orientation
Polymers shrink and orient. Sometimes orientation is unbalanced, resulting in misshaped parts. But there are steps beyond tweaking the die that can mitigate these effects.
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INJECTION MOLDING: How to Specify an Injection Molding Machine
There are 51 things to consider when spec’ing a controller.
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