Polymer Processing Society (PPS) 2006 Annual Meeting, Yamagata, Japan

This year’s twenty-second annual PPS meeting was held in Yamagata on 3 – 5 July 2006 where the meeting was attended by some five hundred delegates of which four came from the UK.  The UK low attendance is a measure of changing times.  Asia now leads in both polymer manufacture and processing; the UK has small pockets of academic processing ability but UK manufacturing appears to have lost its appetite to be involved in polymer processing innovation or technology development.

            New areas of polymer processing technology now involve biomass based polymers such as polylactic acid and increasingly opto electronic devices figure in process development.  There was also a significant number of papers on filled systems and nano clay suspensions figured highly.  In Japan, Toyota are a strong driving force for technological innovation and a plenary lecture at the meeting told us how Toyota is planning “today for tomorrow”.

            There was a lot of rheological content in the meeting and perhaps more British rheologists and polymer processors might be persuaded to attend the next PPS Meeting in Salvador, Brazil, 27 – 31 May 2007.

malcolm mackley