Rotomolded bumper is a kangaroo's best friend.What happens if your off-road vehicle off-road vehicle off n → véhicule m tout-terrain slams into a kangaroo kangaroo, name for a variety of hopping marsupials, or pouched mammals, of the family Macropodidae, found in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. The term is applied especially to the large kangaroos of the genus Macropus. at 50 mph in the Australian outback? Nothing dire, perhaps, if you have rotomolded bullbars in front of your vehicle. Cushioned by these LLDPE LLDPE Linear Low Density Polyethylene parts from Team Poly Pry. Ltd. of Lonsdale, South Australia Lonsdale is an industrial suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. It has the postcode of 5160. Lonsdale was farmed from shortly after European settlement until the 1950s, when the South Australian Housing Trust acquired much of the land for industrial use. , both your car and the kangaroo should get away safely. Bullbars - so called because they protect the front of the vehicle against collisions with cattle or other animals - are typically made of steel or aluminum. But metal bars may hamper air-bag deployment and may inflict more injury in a collision with an animal or person than the car would by itself, says Gary Retallick, president of Team Poly. However, the new Poly Bullbars from his company keep passengers and pedestrians safe while saving thousands of dollars in repair bills, he says. The plastic bars reportedly show great crush strength, even though they are 50-75% lighter than steel or aluminum bars. They act like shock absorbers Shock absorbers See: Circuit breakers , compressing up to 200 mm on impact and then springing back. What's more, the cost of a plastic Bullbar is 30-50% less than a metal one, Retallick says. Team Poly's bullbar has already received global recognition, garnering the Product of the Year Award and the Conversion Award from the Association of Rotational Molders at its 21st Annual Fall Meeting in Vienna, Austria, last October. HOMEMADE MACHINE & MOLDS The Poly Bullbar is molded from a metallic-pigmented metallocene LLDPE resin with a high melt flow (the company would not identify the vendor). The hollow part has wall sections of about 0.47 in. maximum thickness, says Retallick. The shape is unusual for a rotomolded part, having open spaces between the bars. "We have to deflash to a minor degree, in addition to manually loading the molds," Retallick notes. The mold was developed over three years in Team Poly's own mold shop. The molds are designed using 3-D CAD and hand made from sheet steel or cast aluminum. Team Poly also built the rotomolding machine using off-the-shelf materials and PLC controls. The molds rotate biaxially inside a fixed gas-fired oven and can produce a bullbar in 12 min. Building both mold and machine helps Team Poly keep part tolerances as fight as [+ or -]0.1%, Retallick says. One bullbar does not fit all vehicles, so Team Poly expects to have 12 different mold sets in production by June. Team Poly's Adelaide and Sydney factories mold around 2.5 million lb of Bullbars annually. RELATED ARTICLE: Recycled Plastic Scores Big Basketball backboards made of 100% recycled materials are a slam dunk for Composite Technologies Corp. in Dayton, Ohio Dayton is a city in southwestern Ohio, United States. It is the county seat and largest city of Montgomery County. As of the 2005 census estimate, the population of Dayton was 158,873. , and Hurry Sports of Sussex, Wis. Composite Technologies uses the special formulation, dubbed dub 1 tr.v. dubbed, dub·bing, dubs 1. To tap lightly on the shoulder by way of conferring knighthood. 2. To honor with a new title or description. 3. Polymer Fiber Matrix, to make approximately 95% of Huffy Sports' product line of home backboard back·board n. 1. A board placed under or behind something to provide firmness or support. 2. A board placed beneath the body of a person with an injury to the neck or back, used especially in transporting the person in such a way systems. The final product must meet two performance conditions: high impact strength (200 in.-lb.) and high flexural flexural pertaining to the flexure of a joint. flexural deformity fixation of joints in flexion. In the newborn called contracted calves or foals. modulus, a combination that is tough to achieve with recycled materials, says Chuck Zhu, technical director and polymer chemist at Composite Technologies. His firm meets those requirements with a blend of post-industrial and post-consumer injection molding-grade polypropylene polypropylene (pŏl'ēprō`pəlēn), plastic noted for its light weight, being less dense than water; it is a polymer of propylene. It resists moisture, oils, and solvents. and both high- and low-density polyethylenes low-density polyethylene n. Abbr. LDPE A form of polyethylene having many side branches off the main carbon backbone and a less closely packed structure than that of high-density polyethylene. . The mainly PP-based blend also incorporates up to 15% recycled glass fibers to enhance stiffness. The reground fiberglass, consisting of automotive scrap or off-grade material, contains strands averaging 0.25 in. long. Composite Technologies first granulates then dryblends the recycled plastics and fiberglass. Mineral fillers or colors can be added. Next, the firm extrudes 3/8-in. pellets on a single-screw compounding extruder. The extrusion step ensures material uniformity, Zhu says. Composite Technologies then remelts the pellets in a screw plasticator, extruding the material into 10-20 lb brick-shaped billets. These are hand-placed in the bottom mold half of a vertical compression press and molded to the final shape. Preprinted four-color designs and graphics are molded into the product at the press. |
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