National Composites Week – Agriculture Fertilizer Application System

A longtime agricultural products customer here at PlastiCert approached us about a new delivery system they were designing for liquid fertilizers. PlastiCert worked with them deriving the chemical, environmental, and physical requirements. The finished part needed both extreme chemical resistance and structural strength, but no one material could satisfy both requirements.  PlastiCert worked with this customer’s engineering team to come up with an outside the box two-shot solution to their problem.  A chemically resistant material was selected for the first shot and a glass filled reinforced, UV resistant composite was selected for the second overmold shot to provide structural strength and stability.   So we ended up with an overmolding application, with a central vile where the liquid fertilizer would flow, and an overmolded shell that would provide the structural strength.

The two thermoplastic suppliers were leery of the project, thinking the two thermoplastics were too similar in processing characteristics to allow the overmold to be successful. PlastiCert was convinced we could make it work and upon completion of the first and second shot molds, set out on an arduous process development effort to make the product work.

It took little time, and shortly we had a validated process in place and started shipping product for the customer’s testing.

That was seven years ago and the overmolding process is still performing well.

Have a tough product design problem? Need to stretch some boundaries? Give PlastiCert a call. Aside from processing experts, our engineers are products of the Composites Material Engineering program at Winona State University. They are material experts AND molding processing experts  which is a dynamic combination. It serves all of our customers well.