polyolefins
NPE 2000 News Wrap-Up: High-Volume Thermoplastics
NPE 2000 offered up new HMW-MDPE and HMW-HDPE film and molding resins with enhanced mechanical properties, plus new VLDPE resins, a hexene LLDPE with improved stiffness/ strength balance, and an LDPE for high-speed extrusion lamination.
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New Polypropylene Families for Packaging, Blends & Composites
Two new lines of polypropylene resins from Basell North America challenge PS, PET, PVC, and other PPs for clear, rigid packaging.
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NPE News Wrap-Up: Materials
New materials at NPE 2003 target automotive, appliance, and packaging sectors. Engineering thermoplasticsdominate the news, but there were also severalnew TPEs and a few polypropylene introductions.
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Packaging & Automotive Top the News
Food and consumer packaging was the focus of new developments in polyolefins and styrenics, while automotive was the main target for new engineering materials.
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Blow Molding Gets Green Light in Detroit
Technical blow molding is changing the contours of automotive interior trim, load-bearing floors, seat-back systems, and under-hood ducting. Favorable economics, process refinements, and the emergence of tailored materials and equipment are taking the brakes off blow molding's earlier limits, and pointing a way to cost cutting.
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In-Line Compounding of Long-Glass/PP Gains Strength in Automotive Molding
Another approach to long-fiber thermoplastic (LFT) molding is gaining credibility for producing a range of structural and semi-structural automotive parts. It is called direct LFT processing, and is already widely practiced in Europe.
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Materials (K 2001 Preview)
New materials at K 2001 are weighted heavily toward the engineering variety, especially nylons, acetals, and TP polyesters. A large handful of polypropylenes round out the major news.
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New Polypropylene/PPO Alloys Fill a Cost/Performance Gap
A brand-new family of thermoplastics for automotive and other markets offers an intermediate range of cost and performance between those of TPOs and engineering resins such as nylon, ABS, long-glass PP, and some modified PET and PBT materials. GE Plastics, Pittsfield, Mass., has broadened its Noryl range of PPO alloys by adopting a new matrix material: polypropylene. New patent-pending technology allows the incompatible PP and PPO materials to be blended so as to create new balances of stiffness, toughness, and heat resistance in a moderate price range. Initial Noryl PPX grades are priced between $1.20 and 1.80/lb.
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Metallocene PP & PE Weld Strongly to Each Other
Multilayer film applications such as packaging and diapers are just two areas that could benefit from spot welding (instead of gluing) polyethylene to polypropylene. Normally these two resins show poor adhesion to each other. But two years of research at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and at ExxonMobil Chemical in Houston show that metallocene-catalyzed polyolefins can weld to each other with bond strengths much greater than are possible with conventional Ziegler-Natta catalyzed polyolefins.
Read MoreDie Drawing Makes ‘Plastic Steel’From Wood-Filled PP
A developer of new plastics technologies is applying low-temperature die drawing to take advantage of a new raw material: expanded, oriented, wood-filled polypropylene (EOW-PP).
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