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Mueritz |
The volume cost of a raw material input is the purchase cost of a unit volume of the material.
1 It is extremely important to understand the volume cost of polymers and their additives as this plays a key role in their selection for a particular application.
Price is one of the first characteristics of a polymer that a designer looks at before specifying it as the material of construction. Prices vary from time to time, sometimes wildly, but tend to maintain their proportion in respect to other polymers. The recent prices of the commodity thermoplastics, using average prices, are shown in Table 1.
While it would appear that UPVC is by far the cheapest polymer, the natural question is: why does it have such limited applications in eg. moulded products? Assuming that UPVC is as easy to mould as the other commodity thermoplastics, why is it not used...