How can you tell if plastic is acetal?

Plastic Pom

Acetron® Food Grade Blue 50 POM-C is compliant in both Europe and North America, which is one of the key competitive advantages it offers to the food processing industry. For exporting companies, this is critical, as they will now only need one material to meet the demands and requirements of the European Union and North America. Acetron® Food Grade Blue 50 POM-C, colored blue for visual detection, enhanced food product safety and proactive contamination prevention, is the latest addition to Mitsubishi Chemical Advanced Materials’ dual compliance offerings (FDA and EU Food Grade).

Delrin AF Blend provides 2-in-1; resin blends of Delrin AF100 and Delrin 150, and has excellent sliding/friction properties. Bearings made with Delrin® AF Blend can operate at higher speeds while exhibiting less wear. These bearings can also be free of the slip-stick effect because their static and dynamic coefficient of friction is tighter than that of most plastics.

Acetal technical data sheet

One more week we are here to bring you the best information of the plastic welding sector just a click away and this time we will talk about “How to learn to differentiate plastics”.

Reviewing the most read or most demanded publications, we have noticed that in many occasions you have doubts or you don’t know how to differentiate the type of plastic you have in your hands.

First, we leave you the following video with which you can easily differentiate the most common thermoplastics. In the video you will be able to see how we make rods of different materials burn and the difference between them when they burn.

It is a plastic resistant to most solvents and acids. It is widely used in the manufacture of pipes, bumpers … as it is easy to mold and its appearance lasts longer than other plastics.

In the video it is easily observed that when burning it produces a large flame of light yellow color and more orange in the center. It can also be observed that it produces a thin line of smoke and that the plastic deforms downwards.

Acetal material

Polyacetal, also called polyoxymethylene (POM), acetal or polyformaldehyde is an engineering thermoplastic, used in precision parts requiring high stiffness, low friction and excellent dimensional stability. It was created by DuPont between 1952 and 1956, being better known by its trade name: delrin.

This plastic is also known as acetal resin. It was first obtained by the chemist Staudinger, but due to its thermal instability its industrial manufacture was discarded. The fact that its mechanical properties were even superior to those of polyamides led to intensive work being done to solve this problem of low thermal resistance. Thus, in 1958, the acetoacetic homopolymer and the acetoacetic copolymer appeared. In the former, thermal stability was achieved by means of additives. Another very important advantage of POM is its relatively easy processability.

An additional favorable factor is POM’s capacity for chemical recycling, by means of monomer scission, without loss of physicochemical properties, which represents an additional attribute for applications in which the economy of recycling must be taken into account.

How plastics are classified

Polyacetals or polyoxymethylenes, better known as POM, have excellent technical characteristics and are easy to process, which is why they are appreciated by industry as technical polymers. An additional favorable factor is the ability of POM to be chemically recycled, by means of monomer scission, without loss of physicochemical properties, and which represents an additional attribute for applications where recycling economy must be taken into account.

Acetal homopolymers (e.g. Delrin) are formed during the polymerization of formaldehyde. Due to the dense clustering of alternative molecular chains, built up with oxygen and methylene groups, they are highly crystalline and are among the stiffest and toughest unreinforced thermoplastics.

Figure 1 Polyoxymethylene wheels operate at high speeds without the need for greasing. In the same part, the larger diameter ring gear is driven by a steel worm gear, while the smaller diameter integrated gear drives a toothed drive belt.