Plastic & Polymer Mixing Systems

Plastic processing is a massive collection of different workflows and manufacturing steps, typically differentiated by the primary production method being used: plastic injection molding, blow molding, extrusion, 3D printing, machining/milling, thermoforming), or vacuum forming.

Across all these methods, the general principles of plastic processing are about the same up to a certain point. In all cases, plastic is made by extracting and refining crude oil into hydrocarbon monomers, further processing monomer bases into blended polymers (aka polymerization and compounding steps), and then shaping these polymers into plastic feedstock materials such as pellets or filaments. After this step, the different material formats will route to their respective production processes, like pellets to injection molding or shapes to machining.

The terms “plastics” and “polymers” are two ways of referring to overlapping material categories. Simply put, all plastics are polymers, but not all polymers are plastics.

Polymers are materials that consist of repeating chains of monomers (which are small, basic molecular building blocks that can “polymerize” into more advanced molecules). For example, natural monomers such as amino acids can polymerize into proteins, and synthetic polymers such as ethylene can polymerize into polyethylene.

Plastics are one type of engineered, man-made polymers, produced out of synthetic or semisynthetic chains of carbon atoms (monomers) mixed with additives, fillers, colorings, and/or other functional ingredients. In industrial use, plastics can be both a feedstock (raw material) and a finished product, such as with a “plastic pellet” being blow-molded into a “plastic bottle”.

Yes and no. Lodige has extensive experience in rubber processing, and many of our systems can be cross-applied to both rubber and plastic applications. Rubber is not technically a plastic, but it is another form of polymer adjacent to plastics known as an elastomer.

At a high level, elastomers are elastic (meaning that they can stretch and return to their original shape), whereas plastics are rigid and inelastic (meaning when they stretch, their form is changed permanently). In terms of manufacturing processes, rubber differs from plastic by an additional process step known as vulcanization, which is a thermal chemical process to achieve rubber’s durable, elastic properties

Lodige develops application-specific solutions for a wide range of processes in the plastic and rubber industries, including mixing, homogenizing, compounding, granulating, coating, agglomerating, compacting, heating, and cooling. While our systems are generally focused on material preparation and processing up to polymerization, we do support many value-add secondary processing steps in advanced applications (such as for adhesives, resin dispersions, ceramic injection molding, plastisol, and foils).

To name some of Lodige’s many successful plastic and rubber process applications:

• Processing EPS
• Processing PVAL
• Masterbatches / coating powder
• Processing polyolefins
• Continuous basis stabilization of PE/PP
• Processing solvent-based adhesives
• Processing rubber and caoutchouc
• Cold and hot water-soluble foils
• Continuous and discontinuous EPS coatings with additives
• Powder and granulate pigment coatings
• Toner processing
• SBS and Bitumen compounding
• Plastisol, polyamide, and super absorbing production
• Powder injection molding (both ceramic and metal bases)