There’s certainly no lack of ambition in the scheduled event line-ups for the forthcoming NPE2015 and ANTEC^® Orlando, jointly taking place in Orlando, Florida, USA, during the last week of March. The intention has clearly been to fit in as much as possible into the events—both physically and temporally.

NPE2015 (March 23–27) will involve 2,000 exhibiting companies spread over 1 million square feet of exhibition space. Between them, these companies encompass the entire plastics lifecycle—from producers to processors, to fabricators, to end-users, and to recyclers—and every possible application: automotive, consumer products, housing and construction, medical, and packaging.

Meanwhile, ANTEC Orlando (March 23–25) will see 18 technical sessions occurring concurrently in each half-day program, meaning that more than 100 sessions will take place over the course of the three days. Mainly consisting of 30-minute talks and tutorials, these sessions will cover a huge range of different plastics topics, from bioplastics to composites, injection molding, polymer analysis, and design.

Plenary Speech: Nanotech in Space

Monday’s plenary speaker is Michael Meader, a materials scientist who is the manager of the nanotechnology project within NASA’s Game Changing Development Program and chief of the NASA Glenn polymers branch. At the moment, Meader is on loan to the White House Office of Science & Technology, where he’s the director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office. (He’s also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Clemson University and a member of the University of Akron’s College of Polymer Science and Engineering Advancement Council; plus he serves as member-at-large for the American Chemical Society’s Division of Polymer Chemistry.)

The title of Meader’s talk is “The Role of Nanotechnology in Current and Future Space Missions,” in which he will discuss NASA’s rich legacy of research into the development of nanoscale materials, nanoelectronics, and nanotechnology-based sensors. This research has already produced several nanoscale materials and devices that have flown in space. These include carbon nanotube-augmented composite materials that dissipate electrostatic charge on the engine covers and struts used for NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, and aerogels used as thermal insulators for the batteries on the Mars rovers.

Advanced technology like this will also be featured in three technology forums that are new to ANTEC. The first forum on Monday, March 23, is titled “Innovating within a Global Compliance Environment” and will include speakers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Commission, and PolyOne. The final forum on Wednesday, March 25, is titled “Advances in Batteries and Super-Capacitors” and will include speakers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Blue Spark Technologies, and Wildcat Discovery Technologies.

A 3-D Focus

The middle forum on Tuesday, March 24, is titled “3-D Printing with a Focus on Material Development” and will include speakers from various companies and organizations actively involved in 3-D printing and additive manufacturing, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Arburg, and Teknor Apex. Arburg is also one of the sponsors of NPE3D, a new annual exhibition on 3-D printing that’s being held in conjunction with NPE this year (but will also be held independently in non-NPE years).

Housed in its own pavilion, NPE3D will present exhibits and educational demonstrations of 3-D printing provided by around 20 different companies, including equipment manufacturers such as Stratasys and polymer developers such as PolyOne. Stratasys will be showcasing its new Objet500 Connex1 multi-material 3-D printer, which can produce parts from three materials in a single production run, allowing users to create components that contain both rigid and flexible materials (see also the cover story in this issue of PE).

As if that wasn’t enough, 3-D printing is also the subject of a session comprising six presentations at SPI’s Business of Plastics Conference. Like ANTEC, this conference is co-located with NPE2015, but its emphasis is on business issues rather than technical ones.

A Sustainable NPE

Although 3-D printing is clearly a major theme at both NPE2015 and ANTEC Orlando, it’s not the only advanced technology to have its own pavilion. Indeed, it’s trumped by plastics recycling, which has two pavilions as well as its very own zone of the exhibition floor. This “Zero Waste Zone” will house recycling demonstrations, multiple displays of products made with post-consumer recycled material, a cradle-to-cradle education experience, and various special events. Two pavilions will surround this zone: The Recycling Pavilion will contain exhibits by recycling companies and suppliers, while the Sustainability Pavilion will feature technologies that benefit the environment. 

Given all this emphasis on recycling, it’s perhaps not too surprising that all the plastic waste generated by attendees at NPE2015 will be collected for recycling. Slightly more surprising, however, is that the opening ceremony will include a fashion show in which students from the Savannah College of Art and Design will model garments they have created from recycled, reused, or re-purposed plastics. Combining the two main technical themes of NPE2015, these garments will also show off plastic accessories produced by 3-D printing.

“Startup Garage”

Other advanced plastics technologies will be on show at the Startup Garage, which will provide twelve start-up companies with prominently located exhibition stands. The twelve companies are being selected from a list of applications by NPE2015 show management and Startup.Directory, a venture tracking firm. All the companies in the Startup Garage will provide solutions for firms that manufacture plastics or use plastics as a material within their product, but will not have had any commercially available products or services before the beginning of January 2013.

Not only will advanced technology be exhibited and discussed at NPE2015 and ANTEC Orlando, it will also play a central role in delivering content. For the first time ever, the poster presentations at ANTEC Orlando will utilize digital displays and will be grouped into sessions that align with the technical sessions.

Competitive “Race” and Designs

After the success of last year’s inaugural Plastics Race, in which students and young professional members of SPE walked up and down the Las Vegas strip answering questions about plastics at various checkpoints, the competition will be run again at ANTEC Orlando on Tuesday, March 24. This year, however, rather than having the questions printed on a piece of paper, the competitors will utilize a mobile app. 

The idea is for teams of four competitors to look for signs containing QR codes attached to the stands of around 100 exhibitors at NPE2015. Scanning these QR codes with their phones will bring up a question that has some connection to the company running the stand or its products or services. They will need to answer this question, perhaps by speaking with company representatives at the stand, before they can move on to the next QR code.

The race will take place over a period of around six hours, and there will even be some advanced technology for the winners, such as the latest iPads. (More information about the competition, including how to register, can be found at the SPE website www.4spe.org/antec/tpr).

Another competition taking place for the second time at ANTEC Orlando is the “Plastics for Life” global parts competition. This is a kind of “champion of champions” competition for plastic parts, because all the entries must have won a previous SPE parts competition run by specific subject or geographic groups (for example, both the U.S. and the European thermoforming groups run their own parts competitions). As well as a main award, there will also be a People’s Choice award, which will be a daily prize based on suggestions from attendees at the events.

Recognizing Excellence

As usual, various other awards will also be presented at ANTEC. These include the SPE’s top four awards—the Education Award, the Business Management Award, the Research/Engineering Technology Award, and the International Award, which is a lifetime achievement award for contributions to the plastic industry. These will be presented at the NPE Hall of Fame Reception & Ceremony, which will take place on the evening of Sunday March 22, just before the two events officially start.

Other SPE awards, including those given to newly appointed Fellows of the SPE, will be presented earlier in the afternoon at the Leadership Luncheon. This will also be where the SPE president’s pin will be officially passed from the outgoing President Vijay Boolani to incoming President Dick Cameron.

More about the two events can be found at www.antec.ws and www.npe.org.