Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene (ABS)
ABS is an opaque thermoplastic polymer material made from the monomers Acrylonitrile, 1,3-Butadiene and Styrene. Strong and durable even at low temperatures, it offers good resistance to heat and chemicals and is easy to process.
- History
- Properties
- Applications
- Processes
- Recycling
- Faq
History
Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene has been available since the 1940’s and while its increased toughness over styrene made it suitable for many applications, its limitations led to the introduction of a rubber (butadiene) as a third monomer and hence was born the range of materials popularly referred to as ABS plastics. These became available in the 1950’s and the variability of these copolymers and ease of processing has led to ABS becoming the most popular of the engineering polymers.
Properties
Its outstanding material qualities made ABS become one of the most popular plastics materials and an essential element in every day life:
- flexible design
- excellent surface quality
- brilliant and deep colours
- attractive feel and touch
- dimensional stability
- chemical resistance
- impact resistance
Today, the highly versatile material ABS found its way into modern life in almost in every market.
Applications
ABS is used in a broad variety of everyday life applications such as:
- housings for vacuum cleaners
- kitchen appliances
- telephones
- toys
Other important fields of applications for ABS are:
- the automotive industry
- the electrical/electronics segment (primarily in white goods & computer/communication electronics)
Processes
ABS is made by emulsion or continuous mass technique. Globally, the most important is the emulsion process. ABS can be processed by injection moulding or extrusion technique.
Recycling
As virgin ABS is somewhat expensive, recycling ABS is economically very attractive. Recycled ABS can be blended with virgin material to produce products with lower cost while preserving the high quality. ABS is recycled by first shredding used plastics to produce shredded plastics. After this step, metals and undesirable plastics are separated from the shredded plastics to produce separated plastics. This separation process is often accomplished by using a water system with different velocity water streams on top of each other. After the material composition of the separated plastics has been analysed, the recovered ABS can be blended with virgin ABS to produce a desirable recycled plastic.
