When Suggar, a leading appliance maker in Brazil, began offering transparent top doors instead of opaque plastic doors on three of its most popular washing machine models, sales went up. According to Marcelo Emrich Soares, manufacturing director, Suggar, its customers like the look of clear plastic.
Initially, the company used styrene acrylonitrile (SAN) to provide the transparency, but it did not have the impact resistance required for the part, which receives constant handling.
The Top Max 5.0, the Viva, and the Viva Max 6.0 model washing machines now use polypropylene (PP) clarified with Milliken Chemical‚’s Millad‚® NX8000. With Millad clarifier, polypropylene provides the transparency that customers desire. Typically, it can reduce haze by 50% versus the current industry standard, which makes highly transparent polypropylene an achievable reality.
The Millad clarifier also significantly improves impact resistance for better durability and adds
material strength and rigidity to polypropylene. PP clarified with Millad NX8000 provides Notched Izod impact that is up to five times higher, making it much more resistant to dropping, banging, and other handling impacts. What‚’s more, because it is less dense, the clarified PP is equivalent in cost to the SAN resin. Additional benefits include improved heat and chemical resistance.
Milliken Chemical
www.millikenchemical.com
::Design World::
Filed Under: Appliance engineering + home automation, Materials • advanced
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