Plastic Recycling Research Lab
New York University Abu Dhabi (2018–2020)
Covid is here and we don’t have so much access to campus facilities. However, this summer the plastic lab is open to students taking the Plastic Fantastic!? course.
I’m teaching from Shanghai, so I’m trying to show some possibilities on the use of the heat press machine. Here is a video on how to create some flat texture like this:
A previous post with information about this machine can be found here:
http://plastic.ntsi.info/2019/09/23/findings-of-hdpe-plastics-in-heat-compression-machine/
Muhammad Rafay Ashfaq (Electrical Engineering) and the team working on their Capstone project.
1. Introduction
For our capstone project, my colleagues and I worked on improving an existing Plastic Injection Molding Machine from an electrical and mechanical engineering standpoint. Maintaining the machine’s overall vertical layout, an improvement in its usability and performance was required. To improve its user friendliness, The new design includes wall mounting capability with position height control, electric screw jack to provide a force up to 1000N, PID band-heater temperature controllers and a touch interface to operate these systems. Unfortunately due to COVID-19 restrictions, we were unable to implement the screw-jack feature but you will find it in the schematics and it is an important part of the overall design.
This blog post will provide you with instructions on how to set up your very own injection machine electrical architecture based on our redesign and give you an understanding of how the different components come together to operate as one.
3D model of the designed injection machine. Continue reading “Plastic Injection Machine: How to Implement our Software Architecture”
The three engineering students Kazi Owais Ahmed (Mechanical Engineering), Muhammad Rafay Ashfaq (Electrical Engineering) and Hamza Haider (Electrical Engineering) worked on their new design for a plastic injection machine.
The goal of the group project was to further develop the mechanical and electrical engineering aspects of the Precious Plastic injection machine V02 which enables users to manually inject melted plastic into a mold to create plastic objects. For this capstone project, the group implemented features like a touch screen with integrated user interface to access and control the movement of an integrated electric screw jack. This system enables the user to operate a piston handsfree. A new heating system was successfully designed and implemented. The blueprints and schematics will be published on this website – stay tuned!
Using the heat compression machine, we are able to make rather elementary shapes, like hexagons. This is probably the most common Precious Plastics first project because of its relative simplicity. However, we have been testing it out with different colors, brands, and plastic types. Outlined below we have our process, findings, and future avenues of inquiry.
(Our heat compression machine)
Our process:
Our results:
(Before adding the 30 ml of extra plastic)
(The final result. Notice that the one on the left has a more even color distribution as compared to the other side, pictured on the left)
Current findings:
Surprisingly, different colors react differently. This may be because our blue shredded plastic material was mainly comprised of blue Al Ain bottle caps while the red was a conglomerate of different brands. This, we will have to explore in future tests, when considering brands and purity of the plastic used, since some brands may have different manufacturing processes.
Additionally, the top side (before being flipped) tends to not melt evenly; instead, it maintains its speckled design, perhaps making it more interesting than its other side where it more evenly distributes after the second heating. We need to experiment more with these, especially when considering color fusion in future designs.
Finally the use of paper on top of the plastic while it heats seems to add a wavy texture to the melted plastic, most likely due to its expansion during heating and retraction during cooling. Manipulation of the quality of these plastics could lead to more interesting textures in the design of such simplistic shapes.
Future avenues of inquiry:
While there are many different aspects we still have yet to explore, we need to test the characteristics of the plastic within different colors, even becoming more specific to brands, to see if that makes a difference. Beyond this, we would like to explore how color mixing would change the process. Additionally, we need to see how heating the bottom plate (because the bottom plate is not also heated) would affect the overall distibution of color, rather than maintaining a speckled design.