The main aim of this project was trying to increase the market share of the Palestine Plastic Industrial Company Limited (PPIC) – LADAEN in the cross-linked polyethylene pipes (PEX), with the same good quality at the lowest possible cost in order to overcome the rival Israeli who is the main competitor of the company .
The first step of constructing this project was searching about polyethylene pipes in general and polyethylene raised temperature (RT) and crossed linked polyethylene (PEX) in special. Then after almost all the information were collected, a survey was constructed and then distributed in the northern side of the west bank, to decide the market share of both polyethylene raised temperature (PE-RT) and crossed linked polyethylene of many companies, and the results were analyzed. The final step was conducting different tests and experiments for many reasons such as indicating the bearing of compression supported in different manners (vertical and horizontal).
According to the survey analysis, it was concluded that the main problem facing the PEX pipes is the high selling price compared to the other competitors. And the market share of polyethylene raised temperature (PE-RT) was about 1%, and PalPex about 22% in the northern governs of the west bank, and 3.5% of the whole west bank because of high raw materials cost, also the largest problem which is summarized in deceiving customers from Israeli competitors by distributing fake products in the local market, in addition to Palestinian customers culture centered on trusting in Israeli products more than our national products .
All the tests were conducted basically at An-Najah National University laboratories. The most specified test was the vertical compression test which was made using a Thermo- Press Mold Apparatus with two heated plates. The second important test was horizontal compression test, for all samples from different companies and it was concluded that The Israeli Company Flexanor has many fake products in the market, which cuts more from the PPIC share. From tests it was concluded that Tiami is blended and Flexor are not crossed linked product. Additional tests will be conducted in the near future.
The work in this project will be continued in the next semester and it would focus on reducing the cost of PALPEX and increasing the toughness of PP-RPC.
Polyethylene is a versatile polymer used many applications, but because of its physical
and mechanical properties, there are many restrictions to use it in certain fields or
applications as transferring hot water in heating and plumping systems.
To overcome this problem polyethylene can be modified by cross-linking methods which
are suitable to produce polyethylene pipes for such applications.
Cross-linking is spread in the whole world generally, and in Palestine particularly by
Plastic Industrial Company Limited (PPIC) – LADAEN with a trade name PAL-PEX,
however; the product has faced many problems such as: high selling price and bad
repetition in some cases which affect adversely its market share pipes.
The aim of this project is to decrease the production cost of PAL-PEX pipes and to
increase some of their properties required by standards. Different thermo plastic polymers
were introduced into the blends.
It’s noticed that cross linking percentage increases by increasing the percentages of two
types of thermoplastics.
Also the effect of curing time (for 6 and 8 hours) was studied and observed that as curing
time increases the cross linking percentage increases.
Another parameter was studied which is curing temperature (75, 85, 95◦C) and as
temperature increases the cross linking percentage increases.
For the samples prepared many standard tests were done, and they were acceptable
according to the ISO (2505, 10147, 18553) such as cross linking, carbon distribution
content and longitudinal reversion.