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| Polymer Material Selection - my book as paperback version |
Dear community,
welcome to this exciting update!
From today on the paperback version of my book Polymer Material Selection is available worldwide on Amazon. 📖
I invite you all to have a look and grab a copy.
Enjoy the read!
Thank you and #findoutaboutplastics
Herwig
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| Polymer Material Selection Funnel Example - Plastic Baby Bottles |
Hello and welcome to this new blog post with the topic of polymer material selection. In this post we cover the material selection of baby bottles as an example of the packaging market. We will apply the Polymer Funnel Method (in detail explained here and in this video).
Figure 1 presents the four different stages of the material selection funnel and this overview serves us as a guideline.
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| Figure 1: Polymer Selection Funnel - overview of the four different funnel stages |
Before we start, what are the top 10 markets for plastic applications?
The top 10 markets are:
-Packaging;
-Building and civil engineering;
-Automotive and transportation;
-Electrical and electronics;
-Household, entertainment, and office appliances;
-Mechanical engineering;
-Sports and leisure;
-Medical market;
-Furniture, and bedding;
-Agriculture.
Different types of polymers dominate each market. Packing needs high volume and reliability as well as cost effective commodity polymers, elsewhere Automotive needs engineering and high performance polymers to enable long lasting applications.
Polymer material selection for baby bottles
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| Four parts of a standard baby bottle (source: https://www.mambaby.com/at/p/easy-active-baby-bottle-330ml-deep-ocean-babyflaschen-kombi/fc2f4zf001-hdt21/) |
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| Table 1: Requirement worksheet for baby bottles. |
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| Table 2: Overview preselected grades and their commercial suppliers. |
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| Table 3: Qualitative matrix analysis for polymer based baby bottles |
Interested to talk with me about your polymer material selection, sustainability, and part design needs - here you can contact me
*NEW* my Polymer Material Selection book is available for purchase here *NEW*
Interested in my monthly blog posts – then subscribe here and receive my high performance polymers knowledge matrix.
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| Long-Term Testing Standards of Thermoplastics for Polymer Material Selection |
Hello and welcome back to a new post. As a continuation of the blog post Summary of Testing Standards for Polymer Material Selection we discuss today the topic of long-term testing standards for polymer material selection.
Environmental effects such as temperature, different chemicals, radiation, and time can impact the performance of your plastic product. Irreversible changes are the result and therefore proper preparing by long-term testing during material selection will decrease the chances of part failure under environmental influence.
What are some helpful long-term tests?
Following are the most helpful long-term tests for thermoplastics listed and in Table 1 they are summarized.
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| Summary of Long-Term Testing Standards for Thermoplastics |
1) Immersion test in different media (water, water-glycol, aromatics, alcohols, ketones, acids, bases) for 1,000 - 3,000 hours at room temperature and elevated temperature; standard tensile bars; checking mechanical properties before and after;
2) Heat aging test at different temperatures for 1,000 -3,000 hours; standard tensile bars; checking mechanical properties before and after; supportive standard: ASTM D3045;
3) Creep test according EN ISO 899
4) Tensile Fatigue test according ASTM D3479
5) Thermal Index test according IEC60216 and ISO-527-1/-2 (5,000 hours)
6) Relative Thermal Index according UL 746B
7) Outdoor suitability test according UL 746C
8) Automotive test according ISO 16750
9) Fatigue performance according ASTM D638
Results of the aforementioned tests help to better decide on the suitability of the one or other grade to select for your application.
Thanks for reading and #findoutaboutplastics
Greetings,
Herwig
Interested to talk with me about your polymer material selection, sustainability, and part design needs - here you can contact me
*NEW* my Polymer Material Selection book is available for purchase here *NEW*
Interested in my monthly blog posts – then subscribe here and receive my high performance polymers knowledge matrix.
Literature:
[1] V. Shah: Handbook of Plastics Testing and Failure Analysis, Wiley
Hello and welcome to a new blog post. Today we discuss briefly the major benefits of plastics for our environment. In this post I selected nine impact factors which are in my view important and the list of benefits of plastics not only for the environment is much longer.
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| Major Benefits of Plastics for the Environment And Society |
The following video shows a brief summary:
1) Durability: polymer based pipes are designed to last for more than 100 years. Also they reduce the overall failure rate and ensure fresh water supply to many difficult reachable regions of the world. Additionally, PET plastic bottles make drinking water available in hard accessible parts of the world, and can be recycled after use.
2) Water saver: as we mentioned water before, the production of a plastic bag consumes less than 4% of the water needed to make a paper bag.
3) Light weighting: lightweight plastic parts save around 3,000 liters of fuel over the lifetime of an average car.
4) Food waste prevention: plastics packaging increases the shelf life. In the case of bananas, wrapping them in a modified atmosphere bag extends their shelf-life by 2 to 3 days.
5) Product protection: plastics packaging helps to reduce the products which are sold loose. It has been found that this in-store waste in some cases leads to losses of 20%.
6) Resourceful in production: producing plastics uses only 4%-6% of the world's oil production. The remaining 94%-96% are used for transport, energy, heat or are burnt. We will discuss this in detail further below.
7) Recyclability: thermoplastics can be recycled however it is not always technically or economically possible. In general, recycling one tonne of plastic bottles saves 1.5 tonnes of Carbon emission.
8) Reduction of CO2 emissions: it is shown by several studies that plastics reduce CO2 emissions massively and fossil fuel use massively.
9) Safety: chemicals and additives in plastics are strictly regulated, tested for decades. In most cases they are only present in parts per million amounts.
Furthermore, following characteristics ensuring that polymers are a highly competitive class of materials and will lead to additional growth:
10) Creating complex shapes by using moulding techniques: using injection moulding, thermoplastics, rubbers, and thermosets can be formed into complex 3D shapes. The amount of parts can be reduced by integrating functions too.
11) Chemical resistance and biological inertness: plastic packaging is used to safely use chemicals such as bleach, lubricant oils, solvents, and acids. Using plastics for food packaging and medical applications is enables due to the biological internets of polymers.
12) Electrical and thermal insulators: electrical hardware is safe to use since plastic due not conduct electricity (by adding certain fillers they can be made conductive). The low thermal conductivity of polymers is used in foams for isolation of housing
13) Practical sustainability example from the plastics industry - "Using only as much material as is needed to ensure functionality".
Downgauging of PE film from 200 to 80 microns results in substantial materials savings (Figure 1) and is enabled by improved material technology (less plastics usage without sacrificing product usage).
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| Figure 1: Practical sustainability example - downgauging of PE film from 200 to 80 microns results in substantial materials savings [5]. |
14) Practical sustainability example from plastics industry: replacing plastic packaging materials with other packaging materials, which have the same functionality results in a doubling in life cycle energy consumption and even a tripling in life cycle greenhouse emissions in the EU (Figure 2).
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| Figure 2: Practical sustainability example from plastics industry: replacing plastic packaging materials with other packaging materials will lead to increased emissions [6]. |
15) Practical sustainability examples from plastics industry: replacing hydraulic with all-electric injection moulding machines (Figure 3).
Compared to all-hydraulic machines, all-electric injection moulding machines are
-less expensive to operate,
-quieter,
-produce more consistent parts,
-allow fewer rejections
- and are cleaner since they do not use oil.
Energy reduction of all-electric injection moulding machines ranges between 30% to 60% compared to hydraulic machines. A study [7] found that the savings could be achieved across many materials such as Polycarbonate and Polystyrene. Furthermore, energy saving are achieved even if the cycle time stays the same as required for the hydraulic injection moulding machine. Typical recorded savings for a medical product (inhaler) is 58% and with an automotive component (connector) 62%. The best is to combine all-electric machines and optimize the cycle time of the moulding operation.
Additionally, by using servo-hydraulic injection moulding machines, almost 50% of energy demand can be saved too and they represent a good compromise.
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| Figure 3: Saving energy by replacing hydraulic with all-electric injection moulding machines [7]. |
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| Figure 4: The role of plastic products in the total carbon footprint of consumers [8]. |
17) Practical sustainability examples from plastics industry: embodied energy of commodity plastics
Embodied Energy is refereed to the energy directly or indirectly used in the creation of a unit mass and the estimation consists out of process energy, transportation, and energy of material resources.
The infographic below (Figure 5) compares the embodied energy of commodity and engineering polymers, together with metals.
In general, the estimates for commodity plastics is between 75-100 GJ/metric ton of resin manufactured. If additives and fillers are added, the cradle-to-gate value will change.
Comparing the embodied energy of plastics to other materials, it can be seen that plastics are in a similar range as Copper and Zinc, except for Titanium, Aluminum, Magnesium, and Chrome Steel. This makes metal replacement with plastics attractive: reducing weight by having a lower density and reducing the environmental footprint too.
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| Figure 5: Comparison of the embodied energy of commodity and engineering polymers, together with metals. |
18) Thermal insulation of houses - Expandable polystyrene (EPS) and extruded polystyrene (XPS)
Most of us are familiar with the material of expandable polystyrene (EPS), commercially available under the brand Styropor [10]. Polystyrene (PS) uses styrene as a monomer which is derived from benzene. Since it provides excellent thermal insulation properties as a foam it is used in many applications such as thermal insulation plates for building and roofing, refrigerators and freezers, and industrial cold storage facilities.
The usage of 5 cm thick EPS insulation plates is already enough to reduce the heating effort of your house by half, resulting in saving around 1000 liters of oil per year which represents 2800 tons of CO2 emissions. Comparing the insulation effect of different construction materials, it can be shown that a 2 cm EPS layer has the same insulation effect as a 46 cm solid brick or 120 cm solid concrete (Figure 6).
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| Figure 6: Insulation performance of different building materials - 2 cm of EPS have the same effect as 120 cm of solid concrete [10]. |
19) Plastics are reducing waste
It takes between 1.3kg to 1.8 kg of other material to replace 0.5 kg of plastic [11]. For packaging sector, this impact is shown above at Nr. 14.
20) Plastics composites in aircraft construction: the usage of cabron-fiber reinforced composites in modern aircrafts such as the Airbus A-350 and Boeing B787 Dreamliner (uses approx. 50% plastics composites), lead to a reduction in weight and this translates to a 30% fuel saving.
21) Plastics demand is not growing exponentially - their growth rate is between 3%-4%: Mr. Julian Allwood showed in his book "Sustainable Materials – With Both Eyes Open (2011) [12]" the global demand for the five key materials (Cement, Steel, Paper, Aluminum, and Thermoplastics) since 1960. It can be seen that all materials grow at the same rate of 3%-4% a year.
22) Plastics are not a major source for Greenhouse gas emissions: In 2019, OECD estimated the Greenhouse gas emissions from plastic with 1.8 billion tons (1.6 billion tons from production and conversion; end-of-life: 193 million tons). Therefore, plastics were only responsible for around 3.3% of global emissions, which are around 54.6 billion tons of CO2eq [13].
23) After reading all the data on plastics, there might be still the following question coming up: "Do I use too much plastic products and harm the environment?", the short answer is no and here is why:
The answer was well researched by independent scientist Dr. Chris DeArmitt and he presented literature which shows that plastics (mainly PE, PP, PVC, and PET) only account for 1% by volume (0.4% by weight) of society’s material use. Ceramics (mainly concrete) represent 84%, natural materials like wood 9%, and metals 6%. Global plastics consumption is around 370 million metric tons per year, however this is still small compared to the 90 billion metric tons of overall materials used [14, 15]. In order to put things better into perspective, we can compare the overall amount of materials used to a watermelon and compare it to a blueberry, representing the yearly plastics consumption (Figure 7).
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| Figure 6: Watermelon vs blueberry - comparing the overall material consumption to the plastics consumption (on a yearly basis) [14]. |
24) Plastics & oil consumption: For producing plastics in Europe, it is estimated that 4%-6% of oil and gas is needed. Transport, electricity and heating sectors are taking up 87% of oil and gas which is simply burnt and therefore lost [15].
Additionally to this fact, other sources of oil use are decreased by plastics. By lowering the weight of automobiles, airplanes, ships, packing, and goods, they cut down on fuel use and CO2 emissions. After the manufacturing and production stages, a product uses 80% of its energy.
Products produced of plastic require a lot less energy to produce than those made of other materials. The lifecycle energy consumption of these products would increase by about 57% and the greenhouse gas emissions would increase by 61% if plastics were replaced with alternatives.
Therefore, oil and gas are way too precious to burn them, it is better to make high performance materials, such as polymers, out of them.
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| Herwig's quote on why oil is too precious to be just burned. |
Altogether we can state that plastics are part of our solution and are not the problem.
I published already several posts on how polymer impacting the environment in a positive way:
Turning thermoplastics carbon neutral
Global warming potential vs thermal properties of thermoplastics
Sustainability in plastics industry
Eco profiles of polymer resins
Thanks for reading and #findoutaboutplastics
Greetings
Herwig Juster
Interested in my monthly blog posts – then subscribe here and receive my high performance polymers knowledge matrix.
!NEW! Ultra and High Performance Polymer Selection - new online course coming soon - join the waiting list
Literature:
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/mark-stewart-md-pb?trk=author-info__article-link
[2] https://plasticsparadox.com/
[4] A. Andrady - Plastics and Environmental Sustainability
Hello and welcome back to a new blog post in this fresh year of 2023! I hope you had a successful start into this new year.
Again, materials companies were hit hard in 2022: from supply chain disruptions due to Covid lockdowns in Asia, the Ukraine conflict with its impact on engery prices, in particular Europe and global inflation continued to increase (Eurozone around 10%; North America around 9%).
Looking at the financial markets, the situation is similar. The S&P 500 finished 2022 with -19 % for the year and the NASDAQ composite decreased -35 % in 2022. The Vanguard Materials Index Fund ETF made also -11 % in 2022. Altogether, only 1 of the 11 main sectors was up double-digits (Energy sector + 58%). All the other sectors performed negatively and Communication Services had -14 % the biggest decrease.
Performance of 30 major material stocks - How did the 30 major material stock companies perform in 2022?
5 out of the 30 stocks could make gains for their shareholders (date of estimation: 02.01.2023) and this is 20 less compared to 2021. Cabot and Hexcel Corp. were in the lead with double digit gains.
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| Performance of 30 major material stocks 2022 |
Higher energy costs in Europe impact companies such as BASF which considers future investments outside Europe. Not only in Europe things are shaking. Globally we see shocks in geopolitics, energy and economics which accelerates the probability for a global recession. Predictions for global growth is 2.7% in 2023. This projection was done by the International Monetary Fund and would represent the weakest year for the world economy since 2001 (excluding global financial crisis 2008 and Covid pandemic 2020).
Staying focused for 2023
For sure we will see much slower growth and if a recession can be avoided, material companies will still have several challenges to face (energy prices, supply chain, to name a few).
We know that economy moves in waves and it is important to stay focused during the down-wave.
What plastics businesses can do in such times:
-build up the cash reserves and reduce debt;
-follow the old saying: "when times are good, prepare for tough times".
-keep an eye on future and mega-trends; the next up-wave is around the corner
-diversification due to several income streams
-protect the existing customer base
-continue to innovate and keep up the quality over quantity
-as a small company: find partner and make it together due to hard times by sharing certain assets and skill sets
Thanks for reading and #findoutaboutplastics
Greetings,
Herwig
Interested to talk with me about your polymer material selection, sustainability, and part design needs - here you can contact me
*NEW* my Polymer Material Selection book is available for purchase here *NEW*
Interested in my monthly blog posts – then subscribe here and receive my high performance polymers knowledge matrix.
Literature:
[1] https://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch/markets_sectors/sectors/si_performance.jhtml?tab=siperformance
[2] https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2022/11/18/why-a-global-recession-is-inevitable-in-2023?utm_medium=cpc.adword.pd&utm_source=google&ppccampaignID=18151738051&ppcadID=&utm_campaign=a.22brand_pmax&utm_content=conversion.direct-response.anonymous&gclid=Cj0KCQiAnsqdBhCGARIsAAyjYjTXbfw9837wHG86GmChEaQo9BtO48dBNn3jwp_kVr6rw1v3ETpwiFQaAmZhEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/29/business/global-economy-2023-recession/index.html
[4] https://www.shrm.org/executive/resources/articles/pages/weathering-recession-.aspx
