Magnetizable plastics have been familiar for some considerable time and are sometimes injection moulded into complex moulds and then magnetized as a replacement for permanently magnetized sintered powder magnets. The same applies to soft-magnetic plastics that are processed for various applications instead of sintered ferrites. In these applications various hard-magnetic or soft-magnetic powders or steel fibres are compounded into the plastic.
In the food industry a large amount of stainless steel – but to an increasing extent plastics as well - is used in the manufacture of tanks, moulds, hous-ings, scrapers and other parts. These components do not always come into direct contact with foodstuffs but may contaminate the food with parts of different sizes if damaged. This has given rise to the demand that all plastic parts which may come into contact with food should be detectable and suit-able for use in the food sector.
Through the targeted combination of soft-magnetic components with impact-resistant plastics, LUVOCOM® development engineers have succeeded in producing materials that can be reliably detected by the standard detectors in the food industry, even when the particles are only a few millimetres in size. The advantages are obvious: expensive stainless steel can be replaced by the new materials without any cause for concern and the energy consump-tion of transport systems is reduced substantially by the lighter plastic parts. Further developments are planned on the basis of these products, such as lubricated compounds for detectable friction bearings.