Plastics manufacturing is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor requiring knowledge related to materials science, physics, engineering, and management. Because of this diversity, the plastics process engineer interacts with many stakeholders, including customers, designers, materials suppliers, machine builders, mold/die suppliers, systems integrators, operators, quality engineers, and managers. With so many stakeholders involved, it isn’t surprising that many plastics manufacturing processes are not precisely engineered systems. The resulting processes can be poorly designed, requiring too much investment to achieve too little productivity.

This book was written to educate and support plastics processing engineers, but is also highly useful to others involved with plastics manufacturing who are performing process development, research, and even machinery design. It uses a manufacturing systems engineering approach to provide guidance about plastics manufacturing as an integrated system with broadly applicable analysis of the underlying subsystems.

Contents:
Background, Plastics Manufacturing Systems, Heating and Cooling, Hydraulics and Pneumatics, Electric Drives, Process Sensors, Signal Conditioning, Data Acquisition Systems, Machine Controllers, Process Control, Process Characterization, Process Optimization, Quality Control, Automation, Statistical Labor Data, Material Properties, Unit Conversions, Matlab Primer