Making a New Plastic Product

End of this Session, I will take you to the level where you will have 100% knowleadge to design your own plastic product.

How does a designer begin to make the new or redesigned product?

First of all, the designer must decide which type of plastic to use for his product?

Secondly he must select the best method for [processing the plastic to create the finished product.

Step 1:

Choosing the proper plastic.

There are so many plastics, each with specific chemicals and physical properties which will effect the performance of the product. There can be vast differences in processing these plastics.

There are two basic types of plastics Thermosets and thermoplastics.
Engineering Plastic materials

Selecting the Best Processing Method.

Thermoforming
Rotational molding
Structural form molding
Extruding
Extrusion blowing( Blow molding)
Injection Blow molding
Stretch blowing
Compression molding
Transfer molding
Injection moulding
Injection-Compression molding
Reaction- Injection moulding
Expandable bead molding
Lost-core molding

Not all plastics are suitable for this process.

Advantages and Disadvantages of the above methods.


Processing under this category includes compression, transfer or Injection molding of thermosets or thermoplastics

• Advantages: Suitable for any size product from those weighing fractions of a gram to large
• pallets and containers weighing 40kg and more.
• Excellent surface definition
• Good accuracy
• Good repetitiveness
• High Productivity
• Product finishing usually is not required after molding

Disadvantage:

High Mold and machine cost

We are only going to focus Injection and Blow moulding process in this blog, however we should consider some of the other Plastic processing methods which is available to use.

Extruding: