TESTING FACILITY
Meplas has the necessary equipment and staff expertise onsite to carry out in house polymer and plastics chemical testing. This supporting service facility includes chemicals analysis of polymer raw materials, resins, plastics and composites.
This chemical testing of polymers and plastics is required to ensure that a material is suitable for its intended application. Polymer chemical testing is used to identify fundamental structural information including as molecular weight, molecular weight distribution and information on branching.
Chemical testing of a plastic or polymer material can be complex but can provide valuable information on the additives used and other substances present which is important when trying to understand material performance. Additives, in particular, can impact the polymer physical properties, stability / stabilization and general durability over the lifecycle of the polymer material. Other substances present include catalyst residues and volatile organic contaminants (VOCs).
Meplas’s equipment and qualified staff onsite can apply the most appropriate chemical tests to get the data in order to analyse and understand both the supplier’s material as well as the final pellets being produced by Meplas for their quality and performance. The most common analysis used to understand the quality of the plastic and the pellets produced by Meplas is the Tensile Strength Machine (TSM) and the Melt Flow Indexer (MFI). The Tensile Testing Equipment is an integral piece of equipment as the tensile properties of plastics are important for engineering quality control and design. Results of plastic tensile testing can be influenced by testing speed, environmental conditions, and sample preparation. For these reasons, it is important to control these parameters to obtain testing results that can be used for material compassion purposes, and ultimately design purposes.
The Melt Flow Index (MFI) is a measure of the ease of flow of the melt of a thermoplastic polymer. It is defined as the weight of a polymer in grams flowing in 10 min through a die of specific diameter and length by a pressure applied by a given weight at a given temperature. With this testing equipment facility onsite, Meplas are able to consistently monitor and quality control the pellet production on a daily basis. This is essential so that we can guarantee to our customers that the Pellet quality meets their strict standards for the various manufacturing applications our pellets will be used for.
