An efficient way of using those plastic bottles, thus great thought of waste management. Recycling plastic is the easiest way of making our earth cleaning and free from plastic landfilling. We at Replas encouraging for the same concept of plastic recycling as we manufacturing plastic recycled products like plastic profiles, plastic deck, bollards, furniture etc.
Actually, this material is being used for heavy-duty bridges built to take heavy traffic. The Fort Bragg bridge Chuck references was made for military vehicles, such as Army tanks, and the bridge I reported on, in Scotland, is built to take heavy equipment loads. The same material is used to build railroad bridges, including ties. Pretty amazing stuff. And it looks like the materials supplier, Axion, is increasing its production capability with at least one manufacturing facility:
Thanks for the info Charles. I'm amazed that they were able to get the specs to be that good, actually. Whilel this is not necessarily a material that you would want to use for long-term, high-weight traffic, it might be a great option for lower cost pedestrian bridges in a park, for example.
Chuck, thanks for sifting through the specs and making comparisons with steel. Sounds like, at least for now, this material competes with steel on the lower-end apps in terms of strength and length. But at least it's been done at all--it's a start!
Thanks for the link, Ann. From what I can tell in the Fort Bragg bridge, the Elastic Modulus was somewhere above 350 ksi, which would be very low compared to steel. Ultimate bending strength is 2,300 psi, which again would be much lower than steel. I think steel bridges are designed for 36,000 psi in bending. My guess is that this wouldn't give you the long unsupported spans that steel would but it's very impressive nonetheless and obviously has supported some high loads in short spans.
Great product, no doubt. But unfortunately the cost to bring the finished product up to comparitive strength is market prohibitive, hence the lack of sales (per company financials).
Thanks for the offer, but as a reporter I'd like to know for public use, for the readers. I do understand if you can't reveal proprietary information, and I'm sure our readers do, too.
Thanks for the fire-retardant info. What exactly is the "totally safe component in the material that retards fire"?
Regarding the 34:1 ROI, to be honest that's one of those phrases that tends to sound like PR or marketing, at least without enough contextual info for comparisons. ROI on exactly what? Compared to what? Those are the questions I usually ask a vendor. In any case, what readers have been wanting to know, and so have I, is the relative costs of this material vs the traditional ones, and that information doesn't seem to be available. Hence my guess that the material must be relatively inexpensive by now--or at least the comparative COO with steel must be relatively low, if the Army has been willing to pay for it.
Did you listen to the Army video I gave the link for? There is a 34:1 ROI on the bridges. There is a totally safe component in the material that retards fire. There are also coatings we have developed to render the material totally fireproof.
UK-based Plastic Logic and French company ISORG have created what the pair tout as a first in flexible printed electronics: a large area, conformable, organic image sensor printed on plastic.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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