A sixteen-year employee of Eastman Chemical Company, Tony Pifer is a Senior Applications Engineer in the Injection Molding Technology Group within Eastman’s Specialty Plastics Business Organization. He earned a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from West Virginia University in 1985. In addition, Tony received his Engineering License in 1997 and is a registered professional engineer in the state of Tennessee.

Tony spent his early years at Eastman in the Engineering Division and the Power and Services Division working on a variety of process improvement projects.

For the past three years Tony has worked with customers who use Eastman’s specialty plastics, focusing on their utilization of injection molding technology. Through mold-filling simulation, he assists customers in optimizing their injection-molded parts. In addition, he reviews part designs and tooling designs and makes recommendations to customers concerning the design of injection mold tooling.

For many years, Eastman Chemical Company has been the world’s largest supplier of polyester resin to the packaging industry. During the development of polyester (PET) resins for packaging applications, it was discovered that modifying the composition of these resins through glycol substitution changed many of their physical properties. This led to the development of a selection of clear amorphous copolyester resins with physical properties that made them suitable for the demanding requirements of injection molded medical devices.

Today, these resins are being used in increasingly diverse injection molding applications in the medical market, resulting in physical requirements that are progressively more varied and rigorous. Medical device applications often require some combination of unique property characteristics such as the ability to withstand impact loading or the ability to be cold-formed or swaged. In addition, they must retain their mechanical properties and experience minimal color shift following gamma or ETO sterilization or exposure to lipids, alcohols, and other chemicals used in medicine.

This presentation provides an overview of the physical properties of copolyester resins used in injection-molded applications and how sterilization, alcohols and lipids, and/or cold forming affect those properties.