Automated recycled plastic floor tile maker

• Main Authors: Anosa, Julie Elaine, Chen, Harvey Lexter, Chung, Laryll Elson, Felicitas, Maria Cecilia, Lim, Erika Valynn
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2008
• Subjects: Tile industry > Automation; Plastic tiles; Flooring, Plastic; Flooring, Tile
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/14530
• Institution: De La Salle University

Use and production of plastics are 20 times more than 50 years ago. Plastics make up about 7% of the average household waste, of which 43% is plastic film. Plastic pollution raises environmental concerns for its greenhouse gases, litter, landfill impacts, soil pollution and primary cause of floods. Furthermore, production of vinyl floor tiles is proven to be hazardous to workers within the manufacturing process and also to the environment. This study aims to design a prototype that allocates post-industrial polypropylene wastes into plastic floor tiles to substitute PVC tiles. The group studied existing processes used in the plastic industry like plastic injection and compression molding to incorporate in their design. The prototype consists of two phases, material dispensing and material forming. The first phase is equipped with a hopper fitted with a windmill attachment driven by an AC gear motor in the feed throat for dispensing the plastic is quantified using a weighing assembly, load cell and checkweigher, to be transported with two pneumatic cylinders to the next phase. The material forming phase is composed of the heating, cooling and ejection system which mimics the operation of a compression molding machine. The heating system is composed of cartridge heaters, thermocouples and thermocontrollers. While the cooling system utilized an aquarium pump that the conventional cooling tower, and the ejection system is a plate driven by a pneumatic cylinder. The proponents of the study conducted experiments to determine optimal parameters for the prototype, resulting to a confidence level of 94.44%. These included identifying the set point for the checkweigher and forming files on phase 2 alone to identify the optimum temperature settings. Online experiments were conducted after system integration. These included actual production of the tiles and quality control checks to ensure that the tiles produced were within the specified tolerance.