Be Veg, Go Green, Save the Planet!

Making Hollow Objects without Injection Molding

In unversities, you may have been taught about injection molding. Injection molding is currently the main technology for making hollow plastic objects such as toys, dolls and plastic flowers. What is little mentioned is the fact that injection molding is an energy intensive process, in which lots of electricity is used on melting plastic resins and injecting the molten plastic into cavity of a mold. Although our standard of living wouldn't have been so good without injection molding, this technology is a real burden to the environment. In my humble opinion, injection molding should be replaced for the sake of the environment, although not many people would agree.

Fortunately, one of our members has developed another technology which enables hollow structures to be fabricated photolithographically without injection molding. The new technology is particularly suitable for making micro parts embedded with cavities. Unlike injection molding, the new technology is very suitable for fabricating ultra-small hollow parts with sub-millimetre resolution. More importantly, since this technology involves virtually thermal melting process, it saves a lot of electricity.

The new technology features the use of preferential surface photo-polymerization to form suspended shells over a selected area. The final structures fabricated in this technology can be:

* hollow or having suspended shell(s);

* installed on a substrate or lift-off from a substrate;

* conical, spherical, etc and etc;

* with areas ranging from a few microns to a few centimeters;

This techology and its derivatives have been patented in many places (e.g. GB 2416599 ). However, if you are seriously interested, you can get it under a license. Please feel free to contact us at b l o g @ p o l y m e r f a b . c o . u k. Equally, you can also fill in the following form to contact us:

Reference:

[1] UK Patent GB2416599 A 

[2] UK Patent GB2404454 A 

[3] European Patent EP1659450A1