Instruction:
Prof. Amos Ophir

The netting is made of ribbons/strings (from polymer sheets) and serves as packaging for agricultural produce such as hay. Tama, a company manufacturing agricultural netting made from HDPE, has expressed interest in this project, which researches mixtures of HPDE and PET.

Adding PET to the mixture with HDPE is intended to improve the mechanical properties of the existing netting, such as strength, hardness, impact, and creep. This project tested the addition of various quantities of PET from a recycled source to a HDPE matrix (together with “correlation additives”), in order to find the optimal mixture for manufacturing sheets with extrusion processing and for the hot-stretching process (orientation) of creating the strings.