Granulators are machines that chop small plastic products into fine particles. They are widely used in recycling facilities to prepare scrap and used plastic items for reuse. While shredders and grinders handle large, bulky materials, granulators are meant for smaller plastic items like drums, pipes, car bumpers, bottles, packaging materials, bags and defective plastic products.
Granulators
In many plastic processing operations, plastic products are chopped down in shredders or grinders, and the pieces are then put through a granulator where they are reduced to fine particles by a rotor with sharp blades. Granulators produce material that is round, fine and of a consistent size. For this reason, they are an important part of the recycling process. Quality plastic products require uniform raw material from which they process their products. Granulators are a way to ensure that used plastics can be remade into quality plastic products. Once shredded plastic has been granulated, the material is sold to plastic product manufacturing companies, which melt and form the granules into other plastic products. Most granulators are large and meant for industrial use only.
Depending on what products are being chopped, granulators may be horizontal or vertical in construction. Long items like house siding, pipes and profile extrusions are put through horizontal granulators, while all other smaller objects are fed into vertically oriented machines. The whole or shredded plastic products are fed through an opening into the granulator housing, where sharp blades reduce the plastic into small flakes ranging from .125 to .375 inches. The granules must be small enough to fall through a screen that acts as a sifter, or they are processed a second time. Granulators are powered by an electric motor and have the ability to change speeds and granule size easily. The closed chamber holds the blades and is often sound absorbing to decrease the process' noise volume. In order to function properly, the interior must be cleaned and the blades oiled on a regular basis. The granulating process is the first step in plastic forming operations, which require plastic material that may be easily melted into liquid form; the smaller the granules, the faster they are able to melt. The products are often pre-shred because it saves on operating costs and granulator downtime.
