The Ultimate Guide of PET Sheet
Table of Contents
What is PET Sheet
A-PET sheet is a kind of polyester sheet produced by the process of dehumidifying, drying, melting, plasticizing, extrusion molding, and calendering and shaping using polyester as raw material.
Since the polyester melt flows from the die of the extruder to the cooling roll, and is rapidly cooled on the cooling roll, the polyester rapidly changes from a viscous fluid state to a glass state, and the obtained polyester sheet is in an amorphous (non-crystalline) state. It is called A-PET sheet.
PET sheet vs PVC sheet
Many sheets used PVC materials. It has become an inevitable trend to replace PVC sheets with PET sheets in many applications.
The main reasons are as follows:
- PET has better processing and forming properties. It is difficult to directly process and shape PVC, and a large amount of plasticizer needs to be added. Under high temperature and grease environment, plasticizer and vinyl chloride monomer will precipitate, causing health risks.
- PET has excellent recyclability. After being discarded, PVC is difficult to recycle and cannot be incinerated because it is easy to produce strong carcinogens dioxin and acid gas hydrogen chloride during incineration, which can damage the environment. For example, our xPET foam board production line can use 100% recycled PET as raw material for production.
- The demand and production volume of PET sheet are growing rapidly. As a packaging material, PET sheet has been growing at an annual rate of 20% in China only since 2000.
Advantages of PET Sheet
The advantages of PET sheet mainly come from PET raw materials.
- PET has high crack resistance
- PET can be easily thermoformed
- PET has good barrier properties to oxygen and water vapor
- PET plastic is very light, but it is still strong enough, with high surface hardness, and its mechanical properties are similar to thermosetting plastics
- PET is non-toxic and safe, very suitable for packaging food, as well as retail, electronics and other products
PET sheet has a very wide range of uses, the most widely used in the packaging industry, such as the outer packaging of various products, food packaging, disposable water cups, fruit trays, and so on.
Applications of PET Sheets
APET sheet has high transparency, high gloss, excellent impact resistance and mechanical strength, excellent printability and barrier properties, non-toxic and tasteless, and is an ideal environmentally friendly packaging material.
Products can be sterilized by gamma ray without damaging their appearance and characteristics, and can economically treat waste, including recycling and burning treatment, etc., are electronic appliances, medical and medical equipment, children’s toys, sports protection products, clothing, printing stationery Ideal packaging material for industries such as, food, etc.
It can be formed by blister molding, folding box molding and high-frequency (frequency) thermal synthesis.
- Blister molding
First, the APET sheet is heated to 90-120°C, and then thermoformed into a variety of packaging containers by blister. For containers that do not require heat resistance, the temperature of the blister mold is 30-50°C. For containers with heat-resistant requirements, it can be obtained by increasing the mold temperature and extending the residence time of the blister. - Coated silicon sheet
Silicone (oil) coating is applied on both sides of the material production line, and the product has high transparency, which is used to facilitate demoulding and stripping during the blister process. - Antistatic sheet
The antistatic sheet can be produced by adding an antistatic agent inside (the sheet is opaque) and coating an antistatic agent on the outside, which is suitable for blister packaging of electronic components, accessories and other products.
In daily life, PET sheets have a very wide range of uses, and even many of us may not know that these things are made of PET.
such as:
- City light box advertising, bus stop signs
- Home greenhouses, breeding greenhouses
- Noise barriers beside highways and urban elevated highways
- Insulating gasket
- Widely used in household appliances, medical, chemical, electronics, automotive, daily necessities packaging fields, etc.
Requirements for Raw Materials
For the production of 0.12-1.6mm thick common A-PET sheet, generally use polyester for water bottles, polyester for oil bottles, or polyester for carbonated beverage bottles. Polyester for hot-filled bottles is not used (fast crystallization rate, sheets are easy to whitish).
For thicker sheets that require deep plastic absorption, a 5-gallon bottled water-specific polyester with a slow crystallization rate can be used.
The requirements for raw materials of A-PET sheet are basically the same as those of polyester bottles, and the intrinsic viscosity is required to be in the range of 0.80～0.88dL/g. The scraps of the A-PET sheet are pulverized and reused in proportion.
What is PET micro-foamed sheet
The PET micro-foam sheet is a PET sheet with a dense closed-cell structure formed in the middle layer by precisely controlling the size of the foam.
Compared with the traditional ordinary PET sheet, the PET micro-foamed sheet can reduce the weight by 30% to 40% under the same volume. This means that the use of PET raw materials can be reduced.
Applications that do not need to be completely transparent are increasingly using micro-foamed PET sheets. For example, some big brand shampoo bottles and facial cleansing bottles have used a high proportion of PET micro-foamed sheets for production.
The main features are:
- More cost-saving. The products produced have more price advantages
- More environmental protection. With the same function, less PET material is used, and it is also fully recyclable.
How to Produce PET Sheet
The quality of PET sheet depends on the following aspects:
- Excellent PET sheet production line
- High-quality raw materials
- Rich production experience, with the ability to discover and solve problems encountered in the production process in time
USEON provided a complete solution for a well-known PET sheet manufacturer. We are professional enough in foam extrusion.
So whether you want to choose a traditional PET sheet production line or upgrade to the production of PET micro-foamed sheets, we can meet your needs.