Session: 01-03 Polymers: Systems Engineering and Design

Paper Number: 96725

96725 - Development of a Recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate Filament and its Reprocessing Cycle. 

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a thermoplastic polymer mainly used in packaging industry, especially in water and soft drinks bottles. In Europe most of this post-consumer plastic ends in landfills, incineration units or in environment, contributed to many environmental problems. Recycle of this post-consumer plastic is one way to avoid them and avoid misuse of natural resources.

In this work we pretend to use PET as a feedstock material for FFF and study his limits of reprocessing.  For this, initially water bottles were collected cleaned and ground into flakes. These flakes were them dried and introduced into the Composer Series 350 from 3Devo, to make the filament.  To evaluate this filament, several analyses were made. Chemical analyses were made using a FTIR- ATR unit to all the different recycled feedstocks used. Thermal and mechanical properties were also evaluated. For thermal evaluation, DSC analyses were made also to all the different recycled feedstocks used. For mechanical evaluation, tensile, impact and flexural tests were made according to ISO norms (ISO 527, ISO 179, ISO 178). A morphologic test was also made. The properties were compared to virgen PET from Indorama RAMAPET N180.

The development of a PET filament with hight incorporation of recycled PET, turns out to be a very difficult task, due to the PET high melting temperature, water absorption and issues with crystallinity. 

Presenting Author: Ana Sofia Sousa Escola Superior de Aveiro Norte

Presenting Author Biography: PhD student in chemical engineering and research fellow in the field of recycling and refunding of aluminum and PET packaging

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