Interplas 2002 to stage Designing in Plastics technical centre

Component design has never been more important. Clever and innovative design makes new products commercially viable, attractive to the consumer and provides profits for their manufacturers and suppliers.

Recognising the importance of design and the vital role that plastics play in many of the products and devices that are developed today for all walks of life, Reed Exhibitions has adopted design as the theme for Interplas 2002, this year’s all-embracing polymers exhibition.

The major initiative at the exhibition supporting the Interplas 2002 design theme will be the Designing in Plastics technical centre sponsored by Eureka. This dedicated centre will provide a showcase for sponsoring companies to present their own innovative solutions in the design of plastic and composite products.

The centre will focus on the needs of design engineers, raising their awareness of the benefits of polymers. Proven applications will illustrate how plastics and rubber materials have their own unique property profiles and are able to push back design boundaries by their ability to provide complex mouldings and extrusions which incorporate features that dispense with a host of traditional assembly processes.

The Designing in Plastics centre will target those market sectors that are users of large volumes of plastics and rubbers, and where design has already played a key role in developing new commercial applications. The sectors are: transportation, medical, telecommunications, sport and leisure, packaging, consumer and industrial products and construction.

In addition to seeing and being made aware of the role polymers can play in the development of new products, design engineers will be able to seek practical advice to help them with any real problems they may have. This advice could cover anything from initial material selection to end-of-life recyclability.

Sponsors of the Designing in Plastics centre will be presenting seminars, hosting workshops and running clinics on a daily basis. All the events will be targeted at the needs of the design engineer and participation in them will be free of charge.

Located between halls 2 and 3 is a composite production line that will make a prototype component using manufacturing technology from both polymer and electronics engineering. This will be a live demonstration and will be utilising processes not normally seen in operation together.

Interplas 2002 is occupying Halls 3, 3A, 4 and 5 of Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre over the five days of 30 September - 4 October. 1000 companies will be exhibiting and over 30,000 visitors are expected to attend what is the largest international plastics and rubber exhibition of this year.

Alongside Interplas 2002, in Halls 1 and 2 of the NEC, Reed Exhibitions is staging Nepcon 2002, the UK's leading electronics manufacturing exhibition. Nepcon will have a complementary technical centre to that of Interplas, Designing in Electronics, and design engineers will be encouraged to visit and participate in the activities at both centres.

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Reed Exhibitions
Oriel House, 26 The Quadrant
Richmond, Surrey TW9 1DL

United Kingdom

+44 208 910 7947

www.reedexpo.com