Friday, March 21, 2014

Common Terms Of The Thermoforming Industry

By Lenna Stockwell


Thermoforming companies around the country can actually provide several services which are important for manufacturing - this may not be known to many people though. To create custom thermoformed packaging for several clients could be the topmost task which these companies are able to do. If it interests you to know more on the terms used by workers, here are a few of them.

The process by which a sheet of plastic is exposed to heat at a particular degree until it becomes highly malleable in order to make it viable for forming into many products and package shapes is called thermoforming. What warms up the plastic is either radiant heat or convection before it is forced into a mold. Excess plastic is then removed when it cools down and then you can have your finished product.

The term thermoplastic is referred to the type of plastic required for thermoforming. One type of plastic you may also encounter is thermoset plastic but this one is different though. Thermoset plastics can also be melted and molded however you should know that the first time you apply heat to it, its chemistry changes and so it would not be possible to melt it done again and remold into a new form or product.

Thermoplastics on the other hand are truly recyclable plastics making it possible to use and remold many times. It also comes in different types and in order to classify each type, a special resin identification code is used. You have probably seen these codes before - the number surrounded by a triangle of arrows. Many materials come with these codes like paper products, plastics, glass products and metal products too. Because of these codes recycling centers find it easier to sort and separate items.

Of the resin identification codes, the most common would have to be 1 where it identifies thermoformed packages as well as products made out of polyethylene terephthalate. Plastic water bottles and soda bottles are amongst these products. Many of the recycling centers in the country welcome these products and in some states if you turn these bottles in to a specific type of recycling center you can have a deposit refund.

Of course several more terms are being linked to thermoplastic juts like "polyvinyl chloride" or PVC. PVC is definitely the most widely used of the thermoplastics. Other common types of thermoplastic are nylon, acrylic and Styrofoam. Now these are the plastics which are polymers - a molecule made up of chains of monomers which are large. Monomers are those molecules capable of being chemically bound together. There are polymers which are naturally occurring but then some of them are created by chemists which make them synthetic.




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