MATERIALS | TESTING
Right: DSC equipment such as TA Instruments’ DSC X3 can reveal small variations in crystallinity in recycled and virgin plastics
in product development and product environments. As companies accelerate their product development timelines, the demand for analytical testing equipment and services continues to grow.” Rajaram identifies a number of factors that plastics compounders and masterbatchers need to consider when selecting polymer testing and analytical equipment. “The first and foremost factor is around the data quality and equipment reliability,” he says. “Data quality is driven by the analyser’s sensitivity and resolution – instruments with greater sensitivity allow the user to pick up on subtle signatures that can make the difference between good and bad batches. Next, precision and accuracy are important since analytical data are used to establish limits for go/ no-go criteria – for compounders, confidence in their analyser’s data allows them to stand by their products when it is shipped to their customers. Finally, analysers that are easy-to-use and offer a straightforward test setup with integrated data analysis greatly enhance the lab’s productivity, increasing sample throughput and driving profitability.” The plastics industry is responding to heightened consumer awareness around the environmental cost of plastics waste, says Rajaram. In addition, brand owners have made public commitments to incorporate minimum percentages of post-consumer recycled (PCR) content in their packaging. For plastics compounders, this requires combining waste plastic feedstocks with virgin material to meet their customers’ – the brand owners – commitments. Compared to virgin resins, waste plastic
feedstocks are inherently variable and often contain contaminants, such as incompatible polymers. A common example is the presence of polypropylene (PP) in bales of recycled post-consumer polyethylene (PE). In addition, it is critical to screen the recycled resin for banned additives and substances, since the presence of these contaminants can relegate
the resin into lower value applications. Compounders need to be able to identify and understand their incoming feedstock to mitigate downstream effects using appropriate additives. Determining the variability in an incoming feedstock requires testing additional samples in each batch to ensure statistical validity of the results. For analytical labs, easy-to-use reliable equipment is required that can provide rapid results that meet their planned project timelines and production schedules. In particular, equipment that can simultaneously screen multiple samples offers labs a competitive advantage by significantly reducing their test time. Labs can also benefit from equipment that can directly combine two or more techniques, providing scientists and engineers access to additional information that is not available through stand-alone testing.
Rethinking testing Polymer testing labs are also applying existing techniques in new ways in response to the shift towards sustainability and recycled resins. “For example, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) is traditionally used to study the melting point and crystallinity of polymers,” says Rajaram. “With recycled resins, the DSC’s trace can reveal small differences in the crystallinity of the recycled
IMAGE: TA INSTRUMENTS
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