Environmentally friendly plastic tiles for substituting wooden board, and its processing machine design

Abstract

Plastic waste has become a global problem because it cannot be degraded in nature and in its manufacturing process requires non-renewable resources. For this reason, we need communal awareness to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic. Participating in this awareness, this paper intends to design plastic tiles made from plastic waste to replace natural wooden boards. Wooden boards are industrial forestry products that are becoming more and more expensive because of forestry wood materials are now increasingly scarce. Plastic used as raw material for the plastic tiles is recovered from the land fill. This study also worked on the design of equipment to process plastic waste into plastic tiles. This plastic hot press machine is made of a UNP steel frame. The top heating plate and bottom heating plate use CNC milled aluminum alloy equipped with 8×500 Watts cartridge heater. The heating plate temperature is set with the temperature controller. And the pneumatic piston of 80mm bore × 200mm stroke, 10 Bar, controlled by Outseal PLC. The plastic hot press machine produces two plastic tiles of 240mm×340mm×5mm size, weighing 387gr each, in 110 minutes. Tensile test according to ASTM D638 standard on product specimens shows tensile strength up to 18.0MPa.