A new plastic, produced by powder compression of two polymers, was produced at room temperature for the first time. The breakthrough entails the possibility of plastic, which can be recycled more easily and is more energy efficient to produce.
Will Knight, "New Scientist" (translation: Dikla Oren)
A new plastic, produced by powder compression of two polymers, was produced at room temperature for the first time. The breakthrough entails the possibility of plastic, which can be recycled more easily and is more energy efficient to produce.
Plastic items are usually produced by heating materials to two hundred degrees Celsius or more. They are then shaped according to a pattern. Reheating ordinary plastic during recycling breaks down the material and leaves it unusable.
The use of pressure instead of heat means that it will be possible to reshape the material without needing heating, which causes decomposition. Also, the process consumes less energy and opens the door to lower costs.
When the compression process was first introduced in 1998, it still required significant heating, but Anne Mace and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have now created the "Broplastic" without any heating. They did this by carefully choosing two polymers with different properties and treating them so that they bind to each other in layers on a nanometer scale.
The two polymers used by the researchers were the hard polystyrene and polybutyl acrylate, a soft acrylic material. "If you choose your materials wisely, you can create a material that can be processed at very low temperatures," Mace says.
The team from MIT used a transparent plastic wrap with a pressure of 34 megapascals (about 340 times atmospheric pressure). This pressure is comparable to the pressure already used in the routine design process.
Craig Hawker of IBM's Almaden Research Center in California says there could be a wide range of uses for broplastics, which are produced at room temperature.
"The ability to process and shape polymeric materials at room temperature represents a tremendous advance in plastics production and recycling," Hawker told New Scientist.
The process will not be suitable for the design of all polymeric materials, but Hawker does not see this as a significant delay. "The research represents a general and new idea to eliminate the many problems associated with decomposition by heat. Also, the research may be found useful in a wide range of materials," he says.
Sources: Nature (vol 426, p 424)
