Analysis the property changes of the thermal recycled HDPE and LDPE

Abstract

Polyethylene (PE) is the largest output, the most widely utilized and the biggest consumption variety in the plastic industry. With the growing consumption of polyethylene materials and highly demanding of diverse plastic products in different markets, the quantity of the post-consumer plastic products is annually increasing as well. PE is thermoplastic, therefore, by recycling and regenerating the post-consumer plastic products into new diversity polyethylene products is the most sustainable and environmental method to reduce polyethylene waste plastics. Thus, in this thesis will emphasis and focus on the mechanical recycling method and the recycled polyethylene materials will be focus on High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) and Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) materials. By conducting three times thermal mechanical recycling process to achieve experiments data, in order to analysis the changes of the thermal recycled HDPE and LDPE material properties which is compared with the virgin materials properties. The project experimental practice will be conducted in Arcada Lab, the experimental HDPE and LDPE materials are collected from Arcada Lab Materials. The pelletizer and extruder will be used to recycle virgin HDPE and LDPE materials, by using injection moulding to make tensile test specimens for testing and analysing recycled material properties. Tensile test machine will be used to analysis mechanical properties of the thermal recycled HDPE and LDPE respectively, MFI for analysis flow properties. After the practical experiments, the mechanical property results of thermal recycled HDPE and LDPE materials compare with the virgin materials are slightly de-creased, the recycled materials are suspected more easily to degrade than the virgin materials, and the flow property has insignificant change by repeating MFI testing process.