Visit to Stellar Plastics Corp

Don Goloskie organized visit to Stellar Plastics Corporations - local company that is located 5 miles from Fermilab in St. Charles. Bob, Erik, Peter, Sasha and Don went there. The company specializes in production of custom shape plastics in modest quantaties. Modest in terms of big companies of course.

We did not take pictures, but that was an impressive cite: about 2 dozen machines to produce plastics, shelves full of old moldes, computerized robots that take details out and few dozen spanish youngsters that sort and put details in the boxes.

Perhaps one minus was that place was filled almost up to the roof with different equipment and cleanliness and neatness were certainly not the highest priority, as it should be in this case. They think they are going to get a bigger building soon.

After visit we had a discussion with Gregory Freimuth (President) and Nicholas Steinbach (Sales Manager). The question was could we test scintillator production in their facility. Here I try to summarize what were the issues:

• Plastic piece is quite big - flattness is going to be a problem. Plastic will change shape while cooling down.
• One should take into account that plastics shrinks (0.5-2.5%%)
• Grooves and other surfaces should have >90 degrees angles - so that details whould easily come out of the mold. We were not surprised that it is the case for grooves, but it looks like for the sides it may very well be the case as well. It can be actuall not so bad as we can organize overlapping pieces of plastics this way. They ask for about 10 degree angles.
• They preheat mold to 150^o F (66^oC) and plastic to about 400^oF (204^oC). This can be a problem for some scintillating dyes as they can not sustain heating and decay.
• Scintillator should be ejected through shortest side of trapesoid and flow along grooves - that would give best quality
• They can produce plastic out of pellets only (little granuls). They need about 50 lb to give it a try.