PT Blog

Environmental—Sustainable Hybrid Composites

This is an industry first application of composites combining tree (cellulose) fiber with long glass fiber (LGF) in a polypropylene (PP) matrix to replace 35% short glass-mineral filled PP.  A 24% weight savings and a 13% cost savings were realized. A total $2 million cost savings resulted by reducing weight and reducing cycle times by 20% - 40%. A life cycle assessment improvement was also attained.

Sooner or later a shredder is going to need maintenance, and it may more frequently require cleanout, particularly if you need to separate different scrap materials from one another. With a conventional machine design, that literally means climbing into the feed hopper to accomplish these tasks, which is time consuming and potentially dangerous.

With Republic Machine’s “Split-A-Part” design, however, the entire power frame assembly splits apart horizontally from the feed assembly frame. This gives the operator or maintenance personnel unencumbered access to the rotor as well as other internal machine components.

In one of my previous lives at The Dow Chemical Company, I ran an optical microscopy lab in the Dow Pack Studios facility in Freeport, Texas. One of our tasks was to analyze different inclusions to determine the type and source. This analysis would include making a slide and placing the sample on a hot stage where it would be heated under a controlled manner to melt the polymer away from the inclusion and see how the inclusion responds to heat. The hot stage would be placed under an optical microscope usually at 50× magnification.

I use the term inclusion rather than gel because there seems to be some debate as to what the definition of a gel is. Some say, “It’s not a gel, it’s an un-melt”, or “It’s not a gel, it’s a contaminant”. A quick Google search for the definition of a polymer gel will get you the definitions: gelatin, jelly, bath gels, and others.

Single-use plastics continue to find themselves in the spotlight—in both positive and negative ways. As a result, Collins Dictionary selected ‘single-use’ as its Word of the Year. The group says that its records show a four-fold increase in usage of this word since 2013, with news stories and the likes of the BBC’s Blue Planet II raising public awareness of this environmental issue.

For word nerds (like me), Collins describes the history:

The Technology House (TTH) is a company that knows 3D printing. The Streetsboro, Ohio, business has been 3D printing with stereolithography since its launch more than 20 years ago as a product development firm. Over the years founder Chip Gear and his team have leveraged SLA to quickly and flexibly produce prototypes, master molds for urethane casting, tooling and more.

But until recently, TTH never saw 3D printing as a viable option for manufacturing end-use production parts. Its SLA printers produced parts with fine detail and good surface finish, but brittle material properties. The slow speed and limited materials available for SLA kept 3D printing firmly in the early stages of the product lifecycle at TTH, even as it added machining and injection molding capability to pursue production work. But with the addition of Digital Light Synthesis (DLS) printers and auxiliary equipment from Carbon, 3D printing of parts at production scales has become a full reality for the Ohio business.