How Is Polyethylene Tubing Made?
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Polyethylene Tubing
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Polyethylene tubing is a common pick for projects that need a tough, chemically resistant material to transport liquid at a low pressure. Polyethylene tubing is crack and heat resistant, rarely grows or shrinks, is mostly chemically inert and comes in a variety of different colors. Polyethylene also is a flexible thermoplastic that makes polyethylene a green material in the sense that if the tubing breaks or needs replacing, then the old tubing can be recycled and turned back into base material pellets that will be used to create more polyethylene.
Manufacturing
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Polyethylene resin, like most other thermoplastics, comes in the form of small pellets. These pellets may have additives in them such as UV stabilizers or colors that will remain once the tubing has been made. These pellets are loaded into a hopper at one end of the extrusion line. From the hopper, the pellets of raw material are fed into the machine that performs the extrusion functions. The purpose of the extrusion line is to melt these pellets, blend them together to form a uniform mixture, and then to push the mixture through the die to form tubing.
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Melting, Mixing, Shaping
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Once the pellets are fed from the hopper, they're heated up and melted. The melted thermoplastic is then carried along toward the front of the extrusion machine, and as it goes it's carried by a turning screw. The screw also mixes the melted polyethylene, ensuring it's as uniform as possible. The melted material is then carried through a series of other steps where it is screened for impurities, put under pressure and finally passed through a series of die molds to form the polyethylene into a tube. This process is the same if the polyethylene will be a harder pipe, but the mixture of the material will be different in that circumstance.
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