Comparison of thermoforming machinery between Europe and China and related materials

Abstract

Plastics products exist extensively, and thermoforming is one of the most popular manufacturing methods of plastics in packaging industry. Acknowledging common thermoforming machinery in Europe and China is valuable in describing thermoformed industrial process. This thesis focuses on presenting and comparing thermoforming machinery in Europe and China about production capacity, final product quality and components by the way of literature review. Moreover, fossil-based thermoformed plastics lead to environmental issues and waste disposal problems. Replacing it by some environment-friendly plastics is unavoidable and meritorious. Therefore, the other objective is evaluating materials which is the best among bio-based plastics, PLA and composite materials received from different places with experimental tests approach.

Through a great deal of literature review, Chinese thermoforming machinery is behind European, which mainly represents in three aspects, core components, material requirements and production capacity. Tensile tests, bending stiffness and air permeability are conducted in this thesis to describe some properties of materials, and these materials are PLA, composite materials and bio-based plastics which are similar with LDPE. The result reveals that PLA owns high mechanical performance compared to other conventional thermoplastics with the same thickness, and PLA-250 is the most effective material among these materials.