Octal's APET Sheet Production Process

Octal is the first company in the world to feature Direct-to-Sheet extrusion technology in the production of APET Sheet.

Traditional thermoforming processes start with resin pellets that are fed into large dryers. Any moisture in the polymers during the melting phase will cause problems downstream. These dryers require tremendous amounts of energy to operate.

Once the APET resin has been sufficiently dried, it is loaded into a screw drive that progressively melts the material into a liquid form.

The APET molten plastic will then pass through a melt pump that regulates the amount of APET plastic that will be fed into the extrusion rolls.

A molten curtain of APET plastic is dropped onto the cooled extrusion rolls that will then feed the new sheet into the next segments of the process.

Octal’s Direct to Sheet technology takes away the drying / melting process and replaces it with a resin reactor that creates the product directly from its raw material components.

Octal's reactors create the plastic in a pure molten form, so that when it is time to extrude the polymer, there is no contamination and no need for extensive energy outputs in the drying phase. Since the reactors are directly linked to the extrusion machines, Octal can save as much as 30% of the energy required to produce sheet compared to the traditional extrusion process.