Plastics

The Plastics industry provides important engineering materials for a myriad of applications, including consumer products (e.g., cellular phones, televisions, electronics), packaging, automotive (e.g., body panels, dashboards, lenses), and foods (e.g., films, containers).

Reliable material handling is vital in the Plastics industry to achieve typical manufacturing practices of six sigma operation, process automation, lean production, efficiency optimization, and debottlenecking. These goals can be upset by poor plastics solids flow behavior and lack of proper material handling equipment design and process development.

The base fluff, resin, pellets, pastille, and granule polymer forms are all susceptible to poor flow.  Flow problems may include blocking, sticking, erratic flow, inconsistent discharge, segregation, inefficient mixing and lack of first-in, first-out vessel discharge sequence.  Process upsets can be due to inadequate devolatilization (purging), tempering, catalyst deactivation, over-heating or drying, and insufficient cooling.  Product quality problems can be the result of material stagnation in storage bins, pellet damage (fines generation), or cross-contamination of batches.  Pneumatic conveying of plastics often leads to formation of snake skins, streamers, and angel hair, all of which can plug downstream equipment.