Fortune Plastics

Fortune Plastics was established in 1955 and has grown to become one of the top five plastic bag suppliers in the USA. The company is privately-owned and has plants in Chicago, Phoenix, Nashville, Orlando and Old Saybrook, CT. 

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Fortune Plastics is one of the top five plastic waste disposal bag manufacturers in the USA. In 2005, the company introduced COMP-LETE, a biodegradable and compostable waste disposal bag made from Novamont s Mater-Bi polymers. COMP-LETE has been certified by the US Biodegradable Products Institute. 

Thermal Gradients may be measured or calculated by means of heat flow formulas, etc. After they are established it is likely to be found from the formula that for most cyclic heating conditions the tolerable temperature gradient is exceeded. This means that some plastic flow will result (for a ductile alloy) or that fracture will occur. Fortunately, most engineering alloys have some ductility. However, if the cycles are repeated and flow occurs on each cycle, the ductility can become exhausted and cracking will then result. At this point it should be recognized that conventional room temperature tensile properties may have little or no relation to the properties that control behavior at the higher temperatures. 

The simplest dynamic system to analyse is one in which the stress and strain are changing in a sinusoidal fashion. Fortunately this is probably the most common type of loading which occurs in practice and it is also the basic deformation mode used in dynamic mechanical testing of plastics. 

Fortunately the situation in practice is not quite as complex as it might seem. In general, very acceptable designs are achieved by using impact data obtained under conditions which relate as closely as possible to the service conditions. Impact strength values available in the literature may be used for the initial selection of a material on the basis of a desired level of toughness. Then, wherever possible this should be backed up by tests on the plastic article, or a specimen cut from it, to ensure that the material, as moulded, is in a satisfactory state to perform its function. 

A detailed analysis of the flow of molten plastic between two rotating rolls is very complex but fortunately sufficient accuracy for many purposes can be achieved by using a simple Newtonian model. The assumptions made are that... 

In 1994 a leak of impure ethyl chloride (boiling point 12°C) caught fire, 1 hours after it started, and damaged the plant so extensively that it had to be rebuilt. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured. The leak started at a flange assembly on the delivery of a pump (Figure 8-3), probably due to corrosion of the flanges but possibly due to failure of a plastic bellows. The official report [23] made the following points ... 

One centrifuge was powered by a hydraulic oil installation 2-3 m away. A leak of oil from a cooler was ignited, and the fire was spread by oil and product spillages and by plastic-covered cables. It destroyed the plastic seal between the centrifuge and its exit chute. There was an explosion in the chute and a flash fire in the drier to which it led. The centrifuge exit valve was closed, but the aluminum valve actuator was destroyed. Fortunately, the exit valve did not leak, or several tons of solvent would have been added to the fire. Aluminum is not a suitable material of construction for equipment that may be exposed to fire. 

As an example, for room-temperature applications most metals can be considered to be truly elastic. When stresses beyond the yield point are permitted in the design, permanent deformation is considered to be a function only of applied load and can be determined directly from the stress-strain diagram. The behavior of most plastics is much more dependent on the time of application of the load, the past history of loading, the current and past temperature cycles, and the environmental conditions. Ignorance of these conditions has resulted in the appearance on the market of plastic products that were improperly designed. Fortunately, product performance has been greatly improved as the amount of technical information on the mechanical properties of plastics has increased in the past half century. More importantly, designers have become more familiar with the behavior of plastics rather than... 

An adequate description of material behavior is basic to all designing applications. Fortunately, many problems may be treated entirely within the framework of plastic s elastic material response. While even these problems may become quite complex because of geometrical and loading conditions, the linearity, reversibility, and rate independence generally applicable to elastic material description certainly eases the task of the analyst for static and dynamic loads that include conditions such as creep, fatigue, and impact. 

Fortunately, there are many different types of plastics that can provide all kinds of properties, including specific dimensional tolerances. It can thus be said that the real problem is not with the different plastics or processes but rather with the designer, who requires knowledge and experience to create products to meet the desired requirements. The designer with no knowledge or experience... 

However this solution is not always convenient and may prevent high productivity and/or the production of intricate forms which require high temperature processing. Fortunately, some fire retardants dramatically increase the flowability of fire retardant plastics melts. For example ABS, flame retarded with F-2016 or F-2016M (brominated epoxy) has much higher flowability, melt flow index (MFI), and spiral flow index, than virgin ABS (Fig. 1). 

Hardness is a measure of the ease with which solids can be plastically deformed. This depends on the mobilities of dislocations, their multiplication, and their interactions. Dislocation speeds vary from Angstroms per second to 1013 A/sec. Their concentrations vary from zero to about 1012 lines/cm2 and the interaction possibilities number at least the squares of their concentrations. Fortunately, there are some limiting cases in which a few factors dominate the behavior. 

Long before the age of plastics and nylons, I. G. Farben-industrie was known to many Americans as simply the world s best druggist. Every reputable pharmacy, every physician s bag, every good family medicine cabinet, stocks some of Farben s 6000 medicines. The firm invented a drug that is still the best cure for epilepsy. They made atabrine, the quinine-substitute for treating malaria. And from the aspirin tablet alone, I. G. Farben made a vast fortune. 

Fortunately, you are aware of the study by Aminabhavi and Naik (1998). In that work, the investigators deduced the molecular diffusivities of several alkanes in plastics including LLDPE. Plotting their data as a function of chemical size (here, molar volumes), you have their results as shown in the figure below. 

It is clear that to get an accurate idea of how a rubber behaves in the nip of a mill or the die of an extruder is a difficult problem which has not been solved by the traditional plasticity tests. Hence, these tests have mostly been used as a check on the uniformity of repeat batches. As Figure 6.1 shows, even this may not be satisfactory as no difference in behaviour under the test conditions does not mean that there is not a difference under processing conditions. Fortunately, in practice repeat batches of basically very similar materials do not yield intersecting flow curves. It becomes clear that to obtain improved correlation with processing behaviour in service it is necessary to use tests which involve increased shear rates and/or consideration of the elastic as well as the plastic component of stress. 

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