Institut für Kunststofftechnik - University of Stuttgart
The Institut für Kunststofftechnik focuses its attention on plastic products. Plastics engineering concentrates on the interaction between material, process and product, in order to increase manufacturability and usability properties, intenting to create innovative plastic products which are resource efficient and marketable. Thus, plastics technology does not only comprehend finished and semi-finished plastic products, but also the compounding of a polymer into a ready-to-use plastic, the converting of plastics into usable products and work on the necessary machines, procedures and development processes.
The expertise of the Institut für Kunststofftechnik comprises the entire field of plastics technology: material engineering, processing technology (mechanical and process engineering), and product engineering.
The Materials Technology group improves the plastics material. In order to make a material more efficacious, that is, to make its property profile wider or deeper, the current condition of the material must be ascertained using suitable material testing methods. In plastics engineering, a plastic originates from a compounding process of an innovative combination of polymers and additives. This is all also true for biopolymers and bioplastics. The institute has different lab scale up to industrial scale compounding equipment (twin-screw extruders). You can view the current research work at https://www.ikt.uni-stuttgart.de/en/research/material_engineering
In the Processing Technology group of the institute, everything revolves around machine and processing technology. The institute has industry scale equipment for extrusion, injection molding, blow molding, film blowing, thermoforming, additive manufacturing and more. Understanding a machine, a processing tool, or a processing method appropriately, is essential to increase efficiency. Sometimes, suitable measurement systems and methods have to be invented first. Currently running research projects can be found at: https://www.ikt.uni-stuttgart.de/en/research/processing_technology
A plastic product, made either from conventional plastics, recycled plastics, or made from bioplastics can be made more effective, for example fulfilling several functions simultaneously or fulfilling previously fulfilled functions under more demanding boundary conditions. The product development group of the institute deals with these aspects. For this purpose, at first, the product condition must be determined. It might be necessary to research on the measurement equipment and methods, too. The newest research projects can be found at: https://www.ikt.uni-stuttgart.de/en/research/product_engineering
With our laboratory capabilities and research staff, we are sure to become strong supporters and a benefit for the initiative. The RCI is the right approach to bring the different ways of avoiding additional carbon in the technosphere under one umbrella without banning plastics