Meet our Polymer expert, Senior Technical Service Engineer Francisco Alvarez. Francisco is an experienced polymers industry expert with a strong background in polymer processing and specialist experience in resin testing and design. He is the inventor and co-inventor for several patents related to thermoplastic compositions and has worked internationally to help converters around the globe to improve their productivity and produce better quality parts.
Senior Technical Service Engineer
As its new polyethylene plant in Monaca, USA, gets closer to opening, Shell Polymers has been hiring a team of industry experts, aka Polymer Pioneers and Polymer Pros, with proven track records in polyethylene. In this article, Senior Technical Service Engineer, Francisco Alvarez, shares industry insights from his wealth of experience and four tips for maximizing polymer molding efficiency.
For more than 20 years, Francisco has worked to innovate resin processing. His plastics processing experience is mainly in injection and blow molding, but it is supported by solid experience in sheet-extrusion thermoforming and rotational molding. Francisco is using this expansive knowledge and understanding of converters’ needs to oversee Shell Polymers’ resin design.
“I am heavily involved in defining which type of resins we will produce and what their performance and characteristics will look like, so that we have relevant products for the markets that we want to address,” he says.
Using his two decades of experience, Francisco is currently preparing training tools for both the Shell Polymers team and its customers. These tools will focus on different topics related to injection and blow molding operations.
Francisco’s experience across the polymer industry enables him to provide unique insights and meaningful contributions to the different aspects of resin designs and their in-use performance.
Over the years, Francisco has been gathering experience into the most effective tools for troubleshooting processing or part quality issues. He says infrared thermometers can be very useful for checking the temperature of the melt, and portable infrared imaging equipment has also proven its value by helping to identify issues such as fluctuations in heating bands, and hot or cold spots in the machine.
Sometimes though, he relies more on his trained eye. “I like to carry a magnifying loupe, similar to the ones used for jewelry,” he says. “It has often helped me to identify foreign contaminants that show as specks in a part.”
"If the nature of the speck can be determined, it is often possible to work on solutions during the trial without the need to wait for laboratory testing."
Technical service engineers, highly trained polymer scientists, and applications technologists all pledge to align with Shell Polymers core values to care for and respect each other, the community, their customers, and their partners. Francisco says this team commitment is a huge motivator and a fantastic guideline to ensure everyone working in the Shell Polymers team delivers an unrivaled customer experience.
Maintaining proper housekeeping is now more important than ever, not just for safety reasons and to keep a good work environment, but also because of the big push towards having more sustainable and circular plastics operations. Ensuring clean recovered materials enables a better quality regrind and reprocessing to secondary operations.
“If during our daily operations we have good handling practices for the resin, parts, melt patties, short shots in injection molded parts, flash from blow-molded bottles and so on, we will avoid introducing contaminants to the recycle streams,” Francisco says.
The Technical Service team is hard at work getting the applications hall stocked with state-of-the-art machines! Here’s Francisco and Technical Service Engineer Elliot Carnevale, in front of one of a KraussMaffei machine.