A study on recycling of PC/ABS material used in automotive industry

As plastic materials are light weight, easy to shape and high strength engineering materials, their usage in end products are constantly increasing. As a recyclable material and due to environmental policies being constantly more strict and important by every passing year, plastic material usage in the future will be much higher and wide spread. The use of plastic material in the automotive industry has much more importance compared to other sectors. Increase in the car emissions due to implemented additional functionalities caused by customer demand forced car manufacturers to put tremendous effort on weight reduction studies caused by the constantly tightening EU emissions standards. Due to the technical properties of plastic material, they have become an indispensable material in automotive and other sectors where part weight is an issue. Increasing usage of plastic materials, because of the technical specifications explained above, led to another problem, waste management. Unavoidable waste and scraps caused by the production process during the start-up phase, by the deviations during the serial production and the products after their service life arisen environmental issues which must be managed due to strict environmental policies. Additionally these raw materials are produced from petroleum based monomers and most plastics used in industry are import goods which increases the importance of recycling by means of economical ways. In this study, recycling of PC/ABS material which is being used widely in the automotive industry was examined. For this purpose, scrap parts made of same raw materials are separated, broken down and later granulated in special injection machines, mixed with virgin material with a weight ratio of 5% and 10% and used to produce sub component for a commercially available vehicle The obtained parts were subjected to a free-free vibration test to analyse the effects of recycled material on the mechanical properties of the final product by obtaining primary and secondary modes of the part. According to the obtained results, it is observed that the material is becoming more fragile in the first mode and more elastic in the second mode according to the amount of recycled material.