PlastChicks

On this episode of PlastChicks – The Voices of Resin – Lynzie Nebel and Mercedes Landazuri host Tim Osswald, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Co-Director of the Polymer Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, live at ANTEC® 2022. They discuss the history of polymer research at the University of Wisconsin, plastics knowledge-sharing at ANTEC®, and plastics education trends.

Show Notes

PlastChicks Lynzie Nebel and Mercedes Landazuri with guest Tim Osswald, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Co-Director of the Polymer Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, delve into plastics history, plastics developments at the University of Wisconsin, the evolution of plastics programs in universities, the sharing of ideas between industry and the educational community at ANTEC®, the benefits of participating in SPE-Inspiring Plastics Professionals, and plastics education trends.

Watch the podcast at the SPE YouTube site.

PlastChicks is sponsored by SPE-Inspiring Plastics Professionals and is posted the first Friday of every month.

What is PlastChicks?

PlastChicks – The Voices of Resin, is a plastics podcast hosted by Lynzie Nebel and Mercedes Landazuri, talking about popular plastics topics and the people inspiring the industry! This podcast is supported by the Plastics Industry Association and sponsored by SPE-Inspiring Plastics Professionals. Look for new episodes the first Friday of every month.

00;00;03;21 - 00;00;14;16
Mercedes Landazuri
If you've got a question, the voices of resin are here, oh PlastChicks.

00;00;14;20 - 00;00;33;11
Lynzie Nebel
Plastics is an SPE-sponsored podcast. Hey, we're in in-person and we are in Charlotte, North Carolina at ANTEC® 2022 co-located with a bunch of other stuff, plastics shows, PLASTEC South. All the good ones.

00;00;33;11 - 00;00;36;10
Mercedes Landazuri
Great event. Anyway, I'm Mercedes Landazuri

00;00;36;10 - 00;00;37;15
Lynzie Nebel
and I'm Lynzie Nebel.

00;00;37;15 - 00;00;41;14
Mercedes Landazuri
And with our powers combined, we are PlastChicks, the voices of resin.

00;00;41;15 - 00;01;12;06
Lynzie Nebel
That's us. And we have a real live human with us. We do. We do. Do you want to introduce him? I'll go ahead and introduce him. So this is Professor. Dr. Professor, however you prefer to be called, Dr. Tim Osswald, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison, beautiful campus. And he is also the co-director of their Polymer Engineering Center.

00;01;13;01 - 00;01;14;24
Mercedes Landazuri
Thank you so much for joining us today. Yes.

00;01;15;04 - 00;01;16;00
Tim Osswald
Thanks for having me.

00;01;16;19 - 00;01;46;01
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah. Yeah. So we were really excited to get, you know, the opportunity to talk to you because we've heard a lot of recommendations. I'm on the Injection Molding Board with some people who have tossed around your name before, all good things. Never, never the bad ones. And so when you agreed to, when you were actually here in person and agreed to do an episode, we were really excited and, you know, we don't interview a lot of professors.

00;01;46;01 - 00;02;12;21
Lynzie Nebel
I would say we've dabbled. But you've been teaching at college for a long time and in university. And one of the things we kind of wanted to know is, you know, how have you seen the plastics industry specifically kind of evolve to meet students' needs? Is the plastics industry evolving enough to meet students' needs? What's kind of your take on that?

00;02;13;26 - 00;02;47;08
Tim Osswald
Oh, that is a good, good question. Right. Because yeah, I personally think plastics is underrepresented at the university. There are few programs. I mean, you know, one Pennsylvania, there is Massachusetts-Lowell. We've had a plastics program for years, but I think most at least mechanical engineers are not trained in plastics. And if you look at it, right, plastics have overcome metals by weight now or in many years.

00;02;47;08 - 00;03;04;15
Tim Osswald
It was, I think, 1967. And if you've ever watched a movie The Graduate, it's so when he says, you know, I have one word, plastics. Well, that year, plastics, past metals by volume, which is not a big deal because steel weighs seven times as much. So.

00;03;04;16 - 00;03;06;17
Mercedes Landazuri
Right. I was going to say what the plastic by weight.

00;03;06;29 - 00;03;30;05
Tim Osswald
By weight is now, they're about the same. It's a little bit more with plastics. And yet most mechanical engineers don't know how to design things with plastics, even less process them because they're complicated. They don't follow the rules as mechanical engineers like to see, like linear elasticity and made in solid mechanics or Newtonian fluids. Well, there's none of that, like classes that, none of that.

00;03;30;13 - 00;03;49;06
Tim Osswald
So it makes it complicated. So, so and so. So I think that's one of the reasons it is underrepresented. I mean, I deal with German universities and there are fewer than 50% of German mechanical engineering students take a course in plastics; here is even less.

00;03;49;07 - 00;04;01;12
Mercedes Landazuri
Wow. Wow. And Austria has some pretty good programs as well, I believe. We see we usually see some Germans and Austrians from academia at ANTEC.

00;04;01;12 - 00;04;02;26
Tim Osswald
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00;04;02;26 - 00;04;20;24
Lynzie Nebel
And I think, you know, going to Penn State there and obviously there is a big mechanical engineering program there, too. And I remember a lot of the mechanical engineers used to tease me - oh, plastics! So I can go into plastics and say, Oh, all the time.

00;04;20;24 - 00;04;22;25
Mercedes Landazuri
Seriously? Like the at Penn State Behrend?

00;04;23;04 - 00;04;44;08
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah, like the mechanical engineers thought they were like so much cooler than us, but like a bunch of them are now. I would say out of the handful I know, like still to this day, probably at least a third of them are in the plastics industry now. And, you know, to make fun of the program, maybe they're just making fun of me.

00;04;44;08 - 00;05;05;02
Lynzie Nebel
That's also a possibility. And but they didn't have the training, even though that program is right there. There was nothing, nothing, you know, bridging that gap. And now you have all these people that saw it and maybe have like a very cursory idea that it's different, but still no training in it.

00;05;05;02 - 00;05;11;26
Lynzie Nebel
And I think that's something, it's hard. How do you meet that need, you know.

00;05;11;26 - 00;05;12;05
Tim Osswald
Yeah.

00;05;12;06 - 00;05;31;09
Tim Osswald
And it's so important, I think I mean, I think that's probably no coincidence why you see some plastic parts fail, and they fail because the people designing them had no idea the plastics creep, they don't act like some chemicals and other things like that. And in reality, those are not difficult things to teach. But you have to teach them.

00;05;31;11 - 00;05;34;09
Mercedes Landazuri
Right. Right. And when did? Sorry.

00;05;34;09 - 00;05;49;21
Lynzie Nebel
I was just going to say, I just saw, I was just watching a presentation where the failure was just not radiusing a corner. And it was like, it's stuff like that that is very easy to make sure it's in your design if you know how to do it.

00;05;49;21 - 00;05;50;20
Tim Osswald
Right. Right.

00;05;50;20 - 00;05;57;06
Mercedes Landazuri
So how did University of Wisconsin and specifically Madison campus get on board with plastics?

00;05;57;06 - 00;05;58;05
Mercedes Landazuri
What's the history of the polymers?

00;05;58;05 - 00;06;32;14
Tim Osswald
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that's a really interesting story. So in 1938, one of our students, Ron Daggett, graduated from, with a masters. He had finished his bachelor's in 1936. And he went on, he married his wife, Dorothy. And so they went off to work in the industry. And his first job, it was RCA, and he made a transition from phenolic records to vinyl records.

00;06;32;27 - 00;06;33;10
Mercedes Landazuri
Hmm.

00;06;33;19 - 00;07;00;02
Tim Osswald
And so he's kind of like the vinyl guy. And then during the war, he got a job with a conglomerate that worked for Boeing and McDonnell Douglas to make panels for aircraft because they had run out of aluminum and they had this new material, fiberglass. Right. And so he was making flat panels and putting those in aircraft instead of aluminum panels.

00;07;00;20 - 00;07;26;23
Tim Osswald
And so he, his biggest issue was war, which is I always tell my students, you know, war, which is what's going to kill you, right? War, which is always the problem. And it was then and it's now. So after the war, they wanted to return to Madison. And so in 1946, he got a position teaching, drafting, and he told a chair at the time and he said he said, look, I'm, I want to also teach a course in plastics.

00;07;26;23 - 00;08;22;13
Tim Osswald
I think mechanical engineers should learn plastics. Well, he was, he had no colleagues to speak to. He had no books, no textbooks. It was the first course in plastics, in an engineering program. And unbeknownst to him, that same year in 1946, another professor started in the Department of Chemistry, and that was Professor John Ferry. And so we know the time temperature superposition principle, the WLF equation that's F is Ferry, Williams-Landel-Ferry, and he started working on stress, relaxation and so forth and so Ferry's work and the stress relaxation, was, it reached the climax in 1955 when he published the famous WLF paper, which is really the beginning of polymer physics.

00;08;22;13 - 00;08;45;06
Tim Osswald
At the same time, Daggett was now teaching, 1955. He was nine years teaching a course, plastics and plastics processes, and he did know that there were some weird things that happened to polymer, especially all these new thermoplastics that were developed during the war. They had applied a stress to them, and they would flow, they would creep, and so they had a funny behavior.

00;08;45;06 - 00;09;16;16
Tim Osswald
He didn't know how to explain it, but he was a mold maker. He was a practical plastics engineer, and he had nothing in common with the polymer physicists in the chemistry department. So then it was but somewhere between that time, 1953, Bob Bird arrived in Wisconsin and chemical engineering, and he decided to create a field of transport phenomena which is modeling of flow behavior and rheology, and all this and that, and Bob Bird kind of created the bridge between the mold maker and the polymer physicist.

00;09;17;02 - 00;09;46;01
Tim Osswald
And that's sort of how Wisconsin then became part of the map in Rheology. So we had the Rheology Research Center, Bob Bird published the book, Dynamic of Polymeric Liquids, which is like really the quintessential physical elasticity book. John Perry wrote the book, Linear Physical Elasticity. And so in Wisconsin then became kind of a center for polymer and polymer behavior, polymer processing. But just by people, right people is really what does the whole thing.

00;09;46;01 - 00;09;50;27
Lynzie Nebel
I had no idea about any of that story and that is so cool.

00;09;50;27 - 00;09;51;24
Mercedes Landazuri
That's so cool.

00;09;51;25 - 00;09;53;18
Tim Osswald
And that's why I wanted to go to Wisconsin.

00;09;53;18 - 00;09;54;12
Mercedes Landazuri
So really?

00;09;54;12 - 00;09;54;19
Tim Osswald
Yeah.

00;09;54;19 - 00;10;14;15
Tim Osswald
When I arrived, Ron Daggett was still alive, but he had been retired. Bob Bird was in his last year of teaching. John Ferry was still alive. He died when he was in his nineties. And I knew all of them well. And so I'm really interested in his story. And really I'm not a polymer engineer I am a historian or history of science is my hobby, one of my hobbies.

00;10;15;04 - 00;10;21;00
Tim Osswald
And so I had a chance to chat to all of them and sort of understand how the field developed in that area.

00;10;21;00 - 00;10;49;27
Lynzie Nebel
I think that's so cool because one of the best classes I ever took in college outside of plastics, because those are all just A-plus, was a class in music theory where the professor was kind of annoying, but he took composers and put them into, like, their historical perspective, which I had been into music, but like I had never had a class like that.

00;10;49;27 - 00;11;00;26
Lynzie Nebel
And I feel like this is kind of that same thing, just like, here's all your formulas. Do you know where they came from? Like hearing all that? That's really cool. And I am probably going to think about that a lot.

00;11;00;26 - 00;11;05;23
Mercedes Landazuri
But also interesting to hear about the transition from phenolic to vinyl.

00;11;05;23 - 00;11;24;04
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah, it makes sense for that time period and I think I think just seeing that tie in of people is something we kind of talk about with us and like it's the actually getting together and meeting people and like making those personal connections and that's what drives a lot of change.

00;11;24;17 - 00;11;33;12
Lynzie Nebel
And just sitting behind your computer or doing your work, you don't necessarily think that's the way it works. But that's what I mean, that's proof, right? Yeah, right.

00;11;33;29 - 00;11;52;10
Mercedes Landazuri
And honestly, tradition. I mean, we're here at ANTEC® 2022. I mean, I'm making a plug for that. I think it's just such a great event because you have all these different technical divisions and you can wander into to a Color and Appearance session or Recycling session or Injection Molding and more.

00;11;52;10 - 00;11;54;07
Lynzie Nebel
Step outside yourself a little bit.

00;11;54;07 - 00;11;58;14
Lynzie Nebel
Right, and learn so much more and cross pollinate your knowledge base, right?

00;11;58;26 - 00;12;22;06
Tim Osswald
Yeah. I mean, the ANTEC is perfect for all. I mean, that's where you meet everybody. And I remember meeting my first Professor Tadmor here -- the polymer Tadmore. He was here at the end, and then K.K. Wang who came here, made the program C Mold and I met him here, people from MoldFlow and the people from Moldex, I mean, simulation, all the simulation people, right?

00;12;22;19 - 00;12;37;18
Tim Osswald
I mean, he's going to meet them here. And then the industry, people that have like Joe Dooley from Dow was here, I remember having conversations, like a good place to meet where everybody goes. I've been coming here since I was a graduate student. My first one was in Washington, 1985.

00;12;37;22 - 00;12;38;20
Mercedes Landazuri
Wow. Yeah.

00;12;39;00 - 00;12;41;07
Tim Osswald
So is that fond memories? From ANTECs. Yeah.

00;12;41;12 - 00;12;46;08
Mercedes Landazuri
And you have I mean, probably as part of it, right? Well, you brought three of your graduate students with you.

00;12;46;19 - 00;13;06;19
Tim Osswald
Yeah. And this year is actually few. And typically we've between Tom Turng, my colleague, the other co-director, and we bring maybe 10 to 15 graduates to this, but this year we only brought three. So but normally we bring more in. This year it was just we weren't prepared. We didn't know if we would come right. And they didn't have any papers.

00;13;06;19 - 00;13;10;07
Tim Osswald
And so but, but then I decided to bring three of them.

00;13;10;07 - 00;13;12;11
Mercedes Landazuri
Yeah, well done. Well done, sir.

00;13;12;11 - 00;13;30;29
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah, I love that. Well, and, you know, you said you've been coming to ANTEC for a long time. That you've kind of have, you seen a lot of trends that have ... what's a trend you've seen in like the educational part of the plastics industry, either good or bad?

00;13;30;29 - 00;13;52;24
Tim Osswald
Yeah, I think really that's the nice thing of ANTEC, right? I mean, it's an industry thing, so it's practical. So that one of the good things is it helps us as academics to keep our feet on the ground, you know? So if I'm going to do something, if it's too far off and it's not useful and maybe fun to work on, but nobody's going to use it, right?

00;13;52;24 - 00;14;01;11
Tim Osswald
I mean, people tell you that here, right? And so it helps us also. And look, we're in engineering, right? I mean, I'm an engineering professor. I'm not a physics professor.

00;14;01;11 - 00;14;01;17
Lynzie Nebel
Right.

00;14;01;20 - 00;14;25;03
Tim Osswald
Or so and so it helps me helps me get ideas. And when people then have conversations today, we talk to the guys from Dow, well, what are their needs, right. Where's the industry going? What do they want to know about? What, where do they want some problem solved, is it machine learning or is it artificial intelligence or is it materials or material behavior or whatever it is?

00;14;25;03 - 00;14;44;06
Tim Osswald
So you kind of get a guidance, looking in our resources just because that's what we have, I mean, our asset is having the young people. Right. That are willing to do the thinking for us. And still my grad students, you know, and which is true, I mean, they actually are the ones to do all the work and then I go and take the credit for everything.

00;14;45;12 - 00;14;53;01
Lynzie Nebel
So you guys are like doing you guys are like the trendsetters in the industry based off of problems, really is what it comes down to.

00;14;53;01 - 00;14;53;29
Tim Osswald
In some things.

00;14;54;02 - 00;15;16;26
Tim Osswald
I mean, I think, for example, I remember in the 1980s, the big thing was, okay, how are we going to be able to do mold-filling simulation? So there were two graduate students and one was doing project and compression molding. That was me. I was working with Chuck Tucker at Illinois and then there was V.W. Wang who was at Cornell working with K.K. Wang.

00;15;16;26 - 00;15;39;26
Tim Osswald
Then they started a company called C-Mold, which was really the first kind of simulation to use their controlled volume approach to simulate so that you could trace mold filling simulation, what today is with MoldFlow or Moldex. You could basically trace it back to its beginnings and add it to the beginning of the eighties.

00;15;39;26 - 00;15;58;26
Tim Osswald
Yeah. So you can actually look at ANTEC and look at the literature and a lot of the papers. Some at ANTEC, of course, end up being part of the journals. Right. Which is also the beautiful thing. Right. So a good paper, you get invited them to publish in Polymer Composites or would be published in Polymer Engineering and Science.

00;15;59;07 - 00;16;07;03
Tim Osswald
And so those are there archival journals that are easier later to find. But ANTEC, I mean, it's searchable. I mean if you go in to SPE.

00;16;07;03 - 00;16;08;26
Lynzie Nebel
Think that's a hugely under-rated...

00;16;08;26 - 00;16;29;26
Tim Osswald
It's a huge resource or it's something that has, you want to find what was done in the plastics of polymer or rheology, applied rheology or failure analysis. You will find it in the proceedings of ANTEC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's not appreciated by many people, but I think eventually people do know that. Right. And enlisted people know that and they will.

00;16;30;03 - 00;16;56;13
Lynzie Nebel
I think it it seems so, I guess abstract at least to someone like, you know, just in industry. I obviously used the journal for resources as a student, but, you know, in industry, I think sometimes I'm like, you know, whatever. And, and then it's like you actually kind of like hit a problem and you're like, Man, I wish there was some sort of, like, information on this.

00;16;56;14 - 00;16;59;01
Lynzie Nebel
It's like, yeah, there actually is.

00;16;59;01 - 00;17;01;22
Mercedes Landazuri
There's so much great information. I use it now all the time.

00;17;01;22 - 00;17;08;12
Lynzie Nebel
Like, you have to like direct your mind and be like, oh, there's, there's a giant library, huge, huge resource.

00;17;09;11 - 00;17;26;19
Tim Osswald
And hundreds of very smart people who have written papers and who have presented them. And they were there and they were. And they're all vetted. I mean, it's not easy to do. I mean, you get reviews and they say you need to change this and that. And so and it's a semi review. I mean, it's reviewed, right?

00;17;26;19 - 00;17;31;25
Tim Osswald
I mean, it's not rigorously review like journals, but but it is I mean, it's, it's vetted.

00;17;33;18 - 00;17;47;18
Mercedes Landazuri
So as something that you'd said, you know, if the concept of a project is too far off, people for an issue will tell you about it here at ANTEC. But what's something that you wish you could dedicate a whole year of teaching to?

00;17;48;22 - 00;17;55;08
Tim Osswald
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. If I had to teach a whole year on something, I would teach the history of plastics.

00;17;55;24 - 00;17;56;19
Lynzie Nebel
I would totally take it.

00;17;56;19 - 00;17;57;06
Mercedes Landazuri
I would take it.

00;17;57;23 - 00;18;17;00
Tim Osswald
And I actually and I do. So I teach a class. So this famous course, it was taught for the first time in 1946, classes in plastics processes. Why fix something that is not broken? Right. Well, I didn't change it a little bit. So when I arrived in 89, I inherited that course. That was me for 17 classes in plastics processes.

00;18;17;00 - 00;18;43;25
Tim Osswald
And I said, Well, we only teach processing there. So I changed the name of the course to Introduction to Polymer Processing and I started a new course for 18, which is Engineering Design With Polymers, which was the plastics portion, and then that engineering design was polymers for me for 18. I start out with lectures on history, so I think the first maybe 8 to 12 lectures are all history.

00;18;43;25 - 00;18;44;06
Lynzie Nebel
I love that.

00;18;44;06 - 00;18;55;14
Mercedes Landazuri
Very cool, actually, a little history of this podcast, the first ever episode that we recorded, which were kind of, I think on the cutting, ended up on the cutting room floor.

00;18;55;14 - 00;19;03;00
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah, but we it was about, we were originally going to do about history. Yeah. Do the history and we actually ended up interviewing.

00;19;03;00 - 00;19;05;18
Mercedes Landazuri
But it came back.

00;19;05;18 - 00;19;12;05
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah. We talk about the phenolics. Yeah. Baekeland's great grandson. Yeah, yeah.

00;19;12;23 - 00;19;27;11
Tim Osswald
But yeah we saw his movie at the at the TopCon in Madison too. And I had seen it before because I've also presented at the plastics history conferences. So there's this group of plastic historians, historians and so.

00;19;27;25 - 00;19;30;02
Mercedes Landazuri
How can we how can we find out more?

00;19;30;02 - 00;19;42;14
Tim Osswald
They have a journal. And yeah, there's a journal. We, I think we meet every two years or so. And so there are talks about it and that's when that movie was showed for the first time. And it was in Lisbon, maybe it was before the pandemic.

00;19;42;29 - 00;19;44;22
Lynzie Nebel
Well, we could go to Lisbon.

00;19;44;22 - 00;19;46;06
Mercedes Landazuri
Yeah, I could, I could, I could swing that.

00;19;46;06 - 00;19;47;01
Tim Osswald
I don't know where the next one is.

00;19;47;02 - 00;19;50;07
Mercedes Landazuri
Didn't you just get your passport updated or something?

00;19;50;07 - 00;20;21;05
Lynzie Nebel
Oh no. Danny's, so totally different. And so you teach, you, as you're saying, like kind of a lot of like plastics processing and, you know, trying to get that information out to mechanical engineers. I feel like my experience in a lot of like smaller custom shops have been, put the mold in, run it, will worry about you know, the process of processing later.

00;20;21;23 - 00;20;30;12
Lynzie Nebel
Do you have any good stories about that, like backfiring on anyone or any like really failed parts because someone just said, I'll run it, it'll be fine.

00;20;30;24 - 00;20;49;15
Tim Osswald
Well, that's how it used to be, right? And today, I mean, you do have simulation, right? You can simulate it and predict some things. But yeah, that's going to be the problem that Ron Daggett had in the 1940s, a war budget. Right. So I have one example. I won't name companies or anything. Right. But they were making the back box of a pickup truck.

00;20;49;20 - 00;21;13;20
Tim Osswald
By compression molding. It weighed 60 plus pounds and so the walls of the pickup truck walls are straight up like this. Right. And you put the lid up in the back. But then there's a corner right here. So it's a U, right, a pick up box is a U and then when they took it out of the mold, the walls like this they fill in four millimeters.

00;21;13;20 - 00;21;43;24
Tim Osswald
So the lid would no longer close and you could see the gap opening at four millimeters or so. And something called spring forward effect simulations can predict that that's in there. It's a curvature induced or anisotropy induced curvature change. So spring forward effect in the metals you have spring backward effect when you mold it like this spring back then with polymers that spring forward, well they had to actually redo the mold and redoing and mold and compression molding is millions.

00;21;43;24 - 00;22;06;25
Tim Osswald
Right. And the mold itself is a three, $4 million to do it. There was no way to fix it. There was, you could put in different heaters because in compression molding, you heat the material. You could introduce thermal imbalances to make it warp the wrong way. But you can't control that. That's too difficult. So basically they had to eventually have to have a mold that was like this.

00;22;07;05 - 00;22;12;27
Tim Osswald
So when they spring forward it would send it to this to the vertical position. That's probably one of the finest cases.

00;22;14;12 - 00;22;34;25
Lynzie Nebel
I do have some experience with some Kentucky windage. Back in my days we were molding the radiator in tanks for heavy machinery. So I do have some some windage experience, but never anything the size of a pickup truck back.

00;22;34;25 - 00;22;42;13
Mercedes Landazuri
Yes, so I know we're running short on time, but you are also involved not just in SPE, but also in the Polymer Processing Society.

00;22;42;22 - 00;22;44;22
Mercedes Landazuri
Can you tell us a little bit about that?

00;22;44;22 - 00;23;09;21
Tim Osswald
Yeah, I actually went to the first PPS meeting, which was in Akron. I think it was like in 1985 or 80 something, anyways. And then I went to the second, the second was in Montreal and Jim White, it was one of the starters, but I'm sure he was a regular here at ANTEC and also Musa Kamal.

00;23;09;21 - 00;23;18;00
Tim Osswald
Musa Kamal just died last year. All these old people are dying right? That's what happens. So anyway, that's so, that wasn't your question. And I kind of like.

00;23;18;07 - 00;23;18;29
Lynzie Nebel
Who is dead in the industry?

00;23;18;29 - 00;23;55;20
Tim Osswald
I know who died or a lot of it so anyways but the other piece is, it's a smaller organization, has more academics, people, more into the rheology, more in the off far left field areas. So it has a place, is more, it's not as practically oriented as ANTEC or as SPE, is a lot more professors although they are researchers, some industry and we have conferences at once a year; there is the international one for everybody and then there's also Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia.

00;23;56;04 - 00;24;04;22
Tim Osswald
So there's quite a few conferences. So I'm a member of both. I'm actually the treasurer of it. I don't know why I'm the treasurer because I don't know how to deal with money. Always overdrawn.

00;24;04;22 - 00;24;05;19
Mercedes Landazuri
Well, that's always awkward.

00;24;06;13 - 00;24;07;15
Tim Osswald
Anyway, right?

00;24;07;15 - 00;24;17;16
Mercedes Landazuri
Well, it's that's the great thing. I was actually talking with Jon Ratzlaff about it this morning. You know, great thing about being a volunteer in a society like this. You can make all your mistakes there. Yeah. Yeah.

00;24;17;16 - 00;24;19;08
Lynzie Nebel
Sorry about that, guys. Who's going to find out. Yeah.

00;24;19;08 - 00;24;19;20
Tim Osswald
Yeah, yeah.

00;24;20;23 - 00;24;42;08
Tim Osswald
And so there is one of the things and so. So there is a relation between them, right. And because a lot of, for example, Ica Manas is here. So she's, I'm going to go for dinner with her tonight. So she's the professor at Case Western. Ica Manas, the mixing guru, and so and she would be great person to interview, she's amazing.

00;24;42;18 - 00;24;58;06
Tim Osswald
So anyway, we are organizing the, they're both having an ANTEC and PPS meeting in Cartagena, Colombia in 2024. So see you there.

00;24;58;06 - 00;25;01;21
Mercedes Landazuri
Oh, very good. So Jaime Gomez will be there as well.

00;25;01;21 - 00;25;04;15
Tim Osswald
Yeah, he will be. Well we talked about it last night. Yeah.

00;25;05;08 - 00;25;09;28
Mercedes Landazuri
Yeah. Well that's, I think that's awesome. Yeah. I think we're short on time because I know, you know.

00;25;09;28 - 00;25;18;28
Tim Osswald
And that's something else,that was it was just vibrating. I'm totally ADD, and if I had been born today, I'd be filled with Ritalin and I don't know what other stuff, right, because I because I'm totally distracted.

00;25;18;28 - 00;25;20;01
Lynzie Nebel
Oh, me too.

00;25;20;03 - 00;25;25;08
Tim Osswald
I just happy the cats are not here on the table, I'd be totally looking at them all the time.

00;25;25;14 - 00;25;32;03
Mercedes Landazuri
For anyone, anyone listening at home or watching. We had two mikes that had a Dead Cat Cover.

00;25;32;03 - 00;25;52;12
Lynzie Nebel
Or it is apparently an industry name for that microphone screen. Yeah, well, I mean, I wish we had all day with you, especially the history and stuff like that. Yes, I live for that. So we definitely should have another conversation.

00;25;52;12 - 00;25;56;09
Tim Osswald
So we can talk about history at one point. We can pick pick a topic in history.

00;25;56;13 - 00;25;57;18
Lynzie Nebel
Oh my gosh.

00;25;57;18 - 00;25;58;03
Mercedes Landazuri
There's a lot of good history.

00;25;58;03 - 00;26;00;06
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah.

00;26;00;16 - 00;26;01;07
Tim Osswald
Yeah, yeah.

00;26;01;17 - 00;26;10;12
Lynzie Nebel
Yeah. So thank you so much for being here in our first live interview in forever. Yeah, forever. Thank you.

00;26;10;25 - 00;26;19;09
Tim Osswald
Thanks for inviting me. This is fun. Yeah. And I follow you guys on Instagram. And so a little piece of it, I'm sure you have it. Twitter @PlastChicks.

00;26;19;09 - 00;26;19;21
Lynzie Nebel
Oh, yeah.

00;26;19;21 - 00;26;20;02
Mercedes Landazuri
We do, of course.

00;26;20;02 - 00;26;22;09
Tim Osswald
Well I'm the @PlasticsProf.

00;26;22;17 - 00;26;22;25
Lynzie Nebel
Oh, cool.

00;26;23;07 - 00;26;25;03
Tim Osswald
So we're kind of related. We're almost cousins.

00;26;25;07 - 00;26;31;16
Lynzie Nebel
Absolutely. That makes cousins. When you write the history book, put that in there.

00;26;31;16 - 00;26;32;17
Tim Osswald
Anyways. Well, thank you.

00;26;32;17 - 00;26;34;11
Lynzie Nebel
All right. Thank you so much, Professor.

00;26;34;11 - 00;27;04;07
Lynzie Nebel
Hey, thanks so much for listening to PlastChicks. New episodes appear on the first Friday of every month, so either follow or subscribe to get those new episodes ASAP. PlastChicks - The Voices of Resin is a plastics podcast sponsored by SPE- Inspiring Plastics Professionals. If you want to find out more about SPE, please visit 4SPE.org.

00;27;04;07 - 00;27;07;02
Mercedes Landazuri
Oh, PlastChicks.