best practices

Extrusion

Pellet Production Is a Blast For This Processor

Maxi-Blast opens a plant with brand-new equipment to produce its own pellet blasting media.

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Get Back to Basics On Water-Cooling Equipment

Neglecting your plant water systems can result in inefficiencies and downtime. Follow these tips when you get new equipment on stream or to maintain what you’re already running.

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Down in the Valley, Profiles Grow

Valley Extrusions carves niche in tight-tolerance, short-run tubing and profiles.

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processing tips

Solve Venting Problems on Twin-Screw Compounding Extruders

Compounds must be free of voids and volatiles or else the material will cause subsequent processing problems. Here’s how to ensure your venting is effective.

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sustainability

Why & When Should You Re-Crystallize PET Scrap?

Whether you’re blow molding PET bottles or extruding APET sheet, you’ll produce amorphous scrap in the process. How you handle it will impact your production costs. Re-crystallizing it will help.

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TOOLING: Dealing with Lifters--Part 2

This installment delves into more detail on some variables of design and fitting/timing of the lifters, which can cause issues or failures during molding.

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screws

EXTRUSION: The Two Main Causes of Screw Wear

Wedging and misalignment are often confused with each other when inspecting a worn screw.

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INJECTION MOLDING: Gate-Seal Testing Done Right

Follow these 16 steps to perform the experiment and learn what is best for your part and process.

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Automation

Speed to Market: Pretium Stays Light on Its Feet And Ahead of the Pack

A visit to its largest PET plant illustrates how this versatile blow molder leverages design skills, a can-do attitude, and a high degree of production flexibility to supply custom products in ever-shorter time windows. A new thrust into automation will help pick up the pace.

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Film Extrusion

Achieving Zero Waste: Two Processors Prove It’s Possible

Working with an Ohio-based recycler, two film and sheet processors go landfill-free.

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Plastics Size Reduction
Process Cooling