EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON THE RECYCLED HDPE AND OPTIMIZATION OF INJECTION MOULDING PROCESS PARAMETERS VIA TAGUCHI METHOD

Present paper investigates the feasibility of the substitution of recycled plastic with virgin plastic. A plastic tray was made by injection moulding, using virgin and recycled High Density Polyethylene (HDPE), and the process parameters were optimized to yield optimum tensile, compressive and flexural strengths. The effect of selected injection moulding process parameters and their optimal settings have been obtained using Taguchi method. The estimated optimal values of mechanical properties e.g. tensile, compressive and flexural strengths for recycled HDPE are 19.900 MPa, 1.228 MPa and 75.127 MPa respectively. These properties differ only by less than 3% from those for the virgin HDPE. Results of investigation, establish that the recycled HDPE can be feasibly substituted for the virgin HDPE as the mechanical properties of recycled HDPE were found close to the virgin HDPE.