19 Feb Resin Materials For Filtration
Selecting Resin Materials for Filtration — Critical Expert Insight
Choosing resin material for filtration isn’t as cut and dry as it was in the past.
New technology, industry needs, and regulations are continuously changing, and as a result, we need more resin options to meet these demands.
The global filtration market is estimated at $29.5B USD, with projected growth to $41.1B by 2025. The continuation of this growth is strong due to government regulations on emissions, energy efficiency, and the desire to achieve safe working environments in industrial settings.
As scientific testing becomes increasingly accurate, so too does our ability to identify and filter contaminants. Choosing the right material for your air and water filtration — or any other application — is a complex process.
There’s no shortage here either. Nearly every industry requires filtration services, including:
- Manufacturing
- HVAC
- Consumer (Water filters)
- Power Generation
- Food & Beverage
- Oil & Gas
- Pharmaceuticals
- Medical
- Metal & Mining
With a continued focus on light-weighting across these many industries, the plastics industry has been able to offer a diverse range of solutions due to these rising demands, including cost reduction, supply-chain stability and optimization.
Today, many manufacturers rely on their material suppliers to help them meet the strict HEPA and NSF regulations by utilizing their material selection for filtration expertise. Additionally, material suppliers are relied upon to help identify, troubleshoot, engineer, and even innovate solutions that exceed the rigorous demands of modern filtration standards.
Solving problems to innovate within the filtration industry requires more than off-the-shelf product selection. Instead, it requires an advanced understanding of resin material, capabilities, and limitations. It is not just about trying to meet and maintain the status quo but to provide innovation as the marketplace demands future-focused solutions for the needs of today and tomorrow.
When choosing resin material for filtration, PolySource’s team of engineers, designers, and technical experts are highly experienced at problem-solving from understanding filter application CTQ’s to recognizing potential performance issues to determining the right material for the application.
Resin Material Selection — Identifying the Right Supplier
OEM’s that produce products in air and water filtration systems are faced with many options in material selection for filtration. Often, identifying precisely what resin materials for filtration is a challenge based on the many requirements and the balance of properties needed.
This is where the insights and advice from a reliable and trusted resin material supply partner are valuable. Unfortunately, most suppliers and distribution partners today no longer offer the necessary technical support in new application development, let alone in resolving issues with the improper selection of the initial material.
It’s common for manufacturers to experience this process by working backward – rather than engineering, designing, and understanding the requirements of the application from the ground-up. Common questions include:
- “What filter material have we used in the past?”
- “Does this resin material meet or exceed current HEPA and/or NSF regulation requirements?”
- “Is there an off-the-shelf solution? Is this the right choice for our filtration needs?”
- “The resin materials we were using for filtration are no longer meeting our customers changing demands — what formulation will?”
These are just a few examples of questions a manufacturer might ask their material supplier. If the off-the-shelf solution isn’t the right fit — or if the solution doesn’t exist at all — resin material selection becomes far more challenging.
The first thing OEMs and manufacturers should be looking for in their resin supplier is a deep technical background, knowledge of polymers and formulations of the resins they produce and/or supply, as well as autonomous relationships with developers in the field.
A strong resin material supplier is one that understands the needs of the application — and all the different parts, people and processes involved — and can customize your materials, working collaboratively to solve challenges.
A trusted resin material supplier will proactively be asking questions about your material selection and manufacturing needs such as:
- How are you going to be successful as a molder or as the OEM with this part?
- What does the material need to do to make that success happen?
- What do we (as the supplier/producer) need to do to customize the formulation from a performance standpoint?
- What can we offer in terms of guidance for molding that can help the manufacturer, OEM, injection molder, etc., process the material?
Innovating Resin Applications for Liquid and Air Filtration
In water, the domestic water filtration market is estimated at roughly $9B, with a projected growth of 15.9% annually and a projected market size of $18.5B through 2026. Currently, the water filtration sector is the largest segment of the industrial filter industry due to government regulation.
Taking an inside look at the filtration market, the domestic air filter market is estimated at $10.4B, with a projected annual growth of 7.3%. Drivers of this sector’s growth include government emissions regulation such as the Clean Air Act, an increased focus on energy efficiency, and cultural demands for environmentally safe working environments.
This is where innovation with resin materials for filtration can provide more effective, efficient, and custom solutions based on application needs.
At PolySource, developing resin materials for air and liquid filtration is a particular specialty. Having worked extensively with the filtration industry, our technical sales team utilizes their comprehensive knowledge with expertise in resin performance capabilities and limitations.
PolySource: Technical and Creative Solutions for the Material Filtration Industry
Working closely with manufacturers, producers, molders, and OEMs, PolySource understands material challenges. This provides us with the ability to innovate and develop new solutions and materials solutions that often do not yet exist. – see how PolySource customized formulations to eliminate concerns for a large filtration OEM.
This dedication to being a true partner — not just a resin material supplier — is both the how and why PolySource created the Integra brand material line. Our private label of thermoplastic resins include UL-listed products and custom formulated compounds to meet specific application requirements.
Integra is a highly customizable resin material line excellent for material filtration, materials for automotive, consumer goods, and just about every other application that needs material solutions.
Due to Integra’s flexibility and highly customizable properties, it is an excellent material to use in a wide variety of filtration applications — especially in development situations where there are no existing material formulations yet.
Developing Materials Solutions for Manufacturability
When developing plastic parts, there are competing interests and many different stakeholders involved in every stage of the process. From marketing and design to engineers, injection molders, business development, supply chain and suppliers, it can be a delicate balancing act from start to finish.
From a design and development perspective, the resin material might check all the required boxes like strength, impact, color, durability, repeatability, etc., on paper. However, once in pre-production and even production, unforeseen problems or requirements may arise. Often, a redesign is not an option.
This is where a resin materials expert is critical to your project. We work to understand your project’s development needs and can help you pivot to find the right resin formulation to solve the problem or meet the newly discovered requirements.
This example is an all-too-common scenario in which molders, manufacturers, producers, suppliers, and OEMs experience regularly. It’s highly cost-inefficient and often results in starting over from square one.
At PolySource, we understand these complex challenges, competing interests, material capabilities, limitations, and costs. Being knowledgeable about these many factors and scenarios enables us to make well-informed recommendations to our customers early in the design process.
In our experience, filtration is an incredibly complex and design-heavy market space when it comes to plastics. There is a huge amount of assembly, where a lot of individual components with complex geometries must fit together with precision accuracy down to the micro-measurement level.
This makes the filtration industry an extremely challenging market space for plastics and material suppliers. The potential for lost resources, capital and time are higher than normal. Without the right resin material supplier, there’s a greater risk that a manufacturer will waste resources.
Working with Industry Material Regulations
With filtration technology constantly evolving and regulation standards changing to keep up with modern filtration demands — especially HEPA and NSF — molders, manufacturers, engineers, designers, and OEMs rely heavily upon the expertise and technical resources at the resin distribution level.
For PolySource, this is a key differentiator versus others on the supply side, as we are not only willing to be a technical resource, but we enjoy it. This is the kind of partnership-focused approach that differentiates an average resin supplier from a true partner.
PolySource is an ISO-certified resin material supplier. While uncommon among resin distributors, we believe that this is just one more reason that demonstrates our commitment to our customers. We believe that an ISO certification demonstrates this commitment.
Our ISO certification helps our customers achieve and maintain their required regulatory practices and compliance standards to document material sourcing and raw material sourcing. PolySource often works with customers that say things like, “I need a hundred percent traceability of all the raw materials,” or, “We need an inspection process for a material above and beyond what would be considered the industry standard.”
Not only is PolySource willing, able and certified to help implement these procedures, but this is business as usual for us. Assuring customers that the resin materials they’re using (in which they purchase from us) meet all of these regulations and requirements is a point of pride at PolySource.
Interested in learning more about how PolySource can assist with your resin material filtration needs? Need assistance with your next project? Contact us to start the conversation today!
