In developing or refining your product, whether it's a high-volume thermoplastic or a specialty coating formulation, you invariably need to consider mechanical properties. To be successful, products must demonstrate competitive (and often superior) performance in their markets. Inherent properties of materials, such as tensile yield strength, impact resistance, and viscoelasticity are critical to the performance of many products.

Impact Analytical's mechanical properties laboratory provides investigative and problem-solving expertise. On the most fundamental level, Impact Analytical provides laboratory-scale compounding and fabrication of polymeric materials. In addition to processing materials into forms suitable for analysis, some compounding instruments, such as the Rheomix TW 100 twin-screw extruder, simulate pilot plant and production conditions, which will reduce your uncertainties associated with scale-up and optimize processes.

Standard industrial test methods—including melt flow, rotational viscosity, tensile and compressive properties, three-point bend, and Izod impact resistance are available at Impact Analytical for the evaluation of your new or modified materials.

A variety of rheological techniques lend themselves to elucidating the practical flow and deformation characteristics of polymer solutions and suspensions, thermosets, and polymer melts. The stress-controlled, strain-controlled, and capillary rheometers at Impact Analytical provide viscosity and viscoelastic material profiles under a multitude of conditions, and can be applied to the determination of yield stress, stress relaxation, and creep properties.

Here are a couple of examples of past problem-solving endeavors:

• A customer needed to know the maximum temperature at which a material could be extruded without suffering degradation. Using the Instron capillary rheometer to gather shear viscosity data over a practical range of processing temperatures, the temperature at which degradation started was determined. This provided the customer with a processing temperature ceiling for their material.
• A small company needed suitable parts for paintability studies of their custom-treated thermoplastic, but had no success in molding their product. Impact Analytical developed a practical fabrication technique, so that the customer's thermoplastic could be evaluated.