How polymer deformulation, reformulation, and domestic manufacturing can reduce dependence on overseas suppliers and create a more reliable source for critical materials. If you source a specialty adhesive, coating, sealant, or polymer component from overseas, you’ve probably had an uncomfortable conversation with your supply chain team recently. Costs and lead times have become harder to predict, and “we’ll just find …
Polymers are found in countless products, from adhesives and coatings to plastics, films, and elastomers. But what determines whether a polymer is flexible or rigid, durable or brittle, chemically resistant or easily degraded? A major part of the answer is how the polymer is synthesized. Polymer synthesis is the process of joining small molecules, called monomers, together to create much …
Walk through any grocery store, pharmacy, or warehouse, and you’ll encounter products made possible by one of the polymer industry’s most versatile manufacturing methods: cast extrusion. From food packaging and medical films to industrial liners and specialty materials, cast extrusion has become an indispensable process for producing high-quality plastic films with exceptional consistency and performance. The Cast Extrusion Process At …
UV curable adhesives have become a core material system in modern manufacturing, particularly in applications requiring fast processing, precise bonding, and minimal thermal impact on substrates. Their adoption spans electronics, medical devices, optics, and advanced composites, where conventional thermal curing systems are often too slow or incompatible with sensitive materials. Fundamental UV Curable Mechanism UV curable adhesives rely on a …
Formulation chemistry plays a critical role in translating raw polymer materials into high-performance, application-specific products. While base polymer selection provides the foundation, it is the formulation that ultimately defines performance characteristics. Understanding formulation chemistry is essential for optimizing material properties, improving manufacturability, and ensuring long-term product stability. 1. What is Formulation Chemistry? Formulation chemistry involves the strategic blending of multiple …
Introduction The transition from laboratory-scale formulation to full-scale manufacturing presents a critical challenge in polymer and coating system development. While laboratory testing provides insight into material performance, it does not fully capture the complexities of industrial processing. Pilot coating processes serve as an essential intermediary step, enabling the evaluation of coating behavior under conditions that closely replicate production environments. By …
Introduction As polymer systems grow increasingly complex, understanding their precise chemical composition becomes critical for quality assurance, competitive benchmarking, regulatory compliance, and failure analysis. Polymer deformulation, sometimes referred to as reverse engineering of polymer materials, is the analytical process of deconstructing a polymer product to identify its constituent components and formulation architecture. Unlike basic material identification, deformulation seeks to uncover …
This post is intended to provide a basic overview of membrane roll-to-roll coating processes commonly used in research, development, and manufacturing. We welcome your feedback and hope this overview is helpful to you and your associates. Membrane roll-to-roll coating is a continuous manufacturing process in which functional coating layers are applied to flexible membrane substrates as the material is unwound …
This post is intended to provide a basic overview of polymer synthesis processes commonly used in research, development, and manufacturing. We welcome your feedback and hope this overview is helpful to you and your associates. Polymer synthesis is the process by which small molecular building blocks, known as monomers, are chemically reacted to form polymer chains with specific molecular weights, …
In the field of custom polymers, toll coating and contract coating are two distinct manufacturing arrangements often used to apply coatings to substrates, but they differ in terms of 3 main things: Let’s first look at the main differences between toll coating and contract coating. Toll coating refers to a service where a company (the toller) provides the coating process …
