High Impact Mineral Filled Polypropylene (TPO) - ON-1017

Project type: Innovation
Desired discipline(s): Engineering - chemical / biological, Engineering, Engineering - mechanical, Engineering - petrochemical
Company: Salflex Polymers
Project Length: 6 months to 1 year
Preferred start date: As soon as possible.
Language requirement: English
Location(s): ON, Canada
No. of positions: 1
Desired education level: Master'sPhDPostdoctoral fellow
Open to applicants registered at an institution outside of Canada: No

About the company: 

Salflex Polymers is a material division of ABC Technologies. It was founded in 1982 under ABC Group. Salflex is a custom compounder of thermoplastic compounds, serve automotive, industrial and consumer markets. Salflex has played a major role in the advancement of thermoplastic and custom compounds for specialized automotive products. It has extensive experience with all high performance engineered resins.

Describe the project.: 

In general, its desired that an injection molded automotive parts made from thermo plastic olefins (TPO) material should have both high impact strength and high resistance to bend, i.e., flexural strength. Improvement in impact strength is achieved via addition of impact modifiers while enhancement of flexural strength by addition of mineral fillers. However improvement in either of these is achieved at the cost of other, hence it’s a challenge to achieve an improvement in both simultaneously. Another aspect of injection molded automotive parts is that though they can exhibit high impact strength at ambient temperature however as the temperatures in winters goes to sub zero, a drastically reduction in the impact strength is observed resulting in failure of parts. Hence there is a need to developed new grades of injection moldable TPOs which would have better impact, flexural strength and 100% ductile failure at -30C°/-40°C compared to existing grades of TPOs.

Required expertise/skills: 

Research team should have strong knowledge and experience of high impact polypropylene, mineral fillers, polyolefin alloys, EP/EPDM based impact modifiers and polymer morphology.