Sustainability

Producing products

SunForce™ ​ combines the excellent properties that only foams can offer—light weight and thermal insulation—with flame retardance (UL-94 V-0), dimensional stability, and the ability to form products with thin walls. SunForce™ is a foam material offering functionality far beyond the capabilities of conventional foams. This material exhibits exceedingly small dimensional variations in processing and offers formability properties nearly equivalent to those of typical injection-molding materials, making them ideal for worry-free use in applications such as structural bodies and equipment chassis, where high dimensional stability is essential.

SunForce™ also features the unique strengths of PPE resins—specifically, low coefficients of linear expansion relative to other resin materials—and remain relatively unaffected by temperature fluctuations.

SunForce™ is produced by filling beads in tooling and applying steam to induce swelling in these beads, resulting in thermal bonding. Thus, in contrast to injection molding—in which resin is injected into a tooling at high temperature and high pressure—the SunForce™ process tends to produce minimal warping and few sink marks in finished products, even for products with spatially-varying wall thicknesses. ​This saves the need to impose shape constraints—such as uniform wall-thickness requirements—offering greater flexibility in designing products.

Exploiting this flexibility—for example, by fabricating molded products with shapes conforming to substrates or harnesses—may, in some cases, save the need for screws or bolts to fix components in place when assembling component packs, simplifying production processes.

Polyacetal (POM) features excellent mechanical properties, sliding behavior, and chemical resistance, and is used for many structural components and internal components.

Asahi Kasei’s TENAC™-C ZM413POM resins are metallic-colored POM copolymers with physical properties and weather resistance equivalent to those of standard weather-resistant grades. This material also complies with various automotive OEM regulations restricting the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for materials intended for use in automobile interiors.​

Typical methods for imparting metallic finishes to products involve painting or plating on the surface of the base resin. However, such approaches are costly due to the multiple processing steps they require—and have the additional drawback of polluting the environment through the use of solvents at various stages. ​We recommend to choose TENAC™-C ZM413 which may save these drawbacks by omitting painting steps from your production process.

Asahi Kasei has "Plastics CAE Technology" an analysis technology specialized for resins.

The following is an example of how Plastics CAE Technology is being used.

The original product (far left image) wasmade of steel and consists of multiple components. We used

CAE technology to perform a topology-optimization analysis (intermediate images), resulting in a final design proposal in which the product was made from resin instead of steel (images at right) and achieved a weight reduction of more than 80% compared to the original design.

In this case, taking advantage of Asahi Kasei’s resin CAE technology allowed the designer  to identify the most efficient distribution of materials within the established design space, subject to the structural limitations and loading and constraint conditions relevant for the scenarios in which the product was expected to be used.

Moreover, the shapes produced by topology-optimization analysis are extraordinarily flexible; in the case study depicted here, this freedom—together with the skill and experience of the engineer performing the analysis—produced an innovative injection-molding design featuring a totally novel shape unlike any existing design and, indeed, beyond the confines of any existing design paradigm. Further investigation revealed superfluous regions of the proposed design; saving these further simplified the shape of the product, ultimately succeeding in decreasing the number of components and dramatically reducing the weight of the final product.

Hinges, used primarily for doors, must be high-strength components and are thus typically made of die-cast metal. However, making attractive hinges typically requires decoration via plating—a process that generates waste water containing metal ions, whose disposal entails heavy environmental impact.

Asahi Kasei’s LEONA™ SG series of polyamide resins not only satisfy all performance requirements demanded for hinges, but also yield attractive final products without painting or plating, slashing overall weight and reducing waste to lessen the environmental impact of the manufacturing process.

Air-pressure regulators are key components installed at many product-manufacturing sites. Because the chassis bodies in which these instruments are enclosed must have a high strength, they are typically made of metal. On the other hand, because the regulators incorporate networks of fine-grained flow pathways to control air flow, their production consumes significant quantities of energy and entails heavy material losses. Switching from metals to Asahi Kasei’s high-strength LEONA™ S series of resins saved the need for post-processing steps, helping to streamline production processes.

Also, because air-pressure regulators are shipped to customers around the world, the reduction in product weight achieved by replacing metals with resins significantly reduced shipping-related energy consumption.

XYRON™ modified PPE resins are materials that offer excellent thermal stability and hydrolysis resistance, and exhibit minimal degradation in physical properties when used as regrind, making them easier to reuse than other resins. This material also boasts the lowest specific gravity of all engineering plastics; its light weight helps to reduce the volume of material used in manufacturing.

Exploiting these properties by using modified PPE resins to manufacture products—and reusing sprues, runners, and other wastes produced at manufacturing sites—allows you to reduce total material usage and minimize environmental impact.

Note: In cases where the external appearance of products is important, impurity contamination due to the use of reused materials can produce defects that result in unattractive products. Avoiding this situation requires carefully optimizing the percentage of reused material used; as a rough guideline, we recommend considering percentages of 20% or below.