INDIANAPOLIS - The Society of Plastics Engineers handed out seven awards during a luncheon May 7 at ANTEC '96, held at Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. SPE gave each winner a $2,500 honorarium and an acrylic plaque. Robert Schad, founder and president of Husky Injection Molding Systems Ltd. of Bolton, Ontario, received the Business Management Award.
Schad founded Husky in 1953. The firm has grown to be one of the world's largest suppliers of injection molding machines, em-ploying about 1,700. Sales for the fiscal year ending July 31, 1995, were $609 million, Husky said.
``Things are changing so fast, everything I got the award for is already gone,'' Schad quipped.
Today just 15 companies have the bulk of the injection press market, down from about 80 companies 20 years ago, he said.
``The older I get the more interesting it gets,'' he said.
Dean Kamen, founder and president of Deka Research and Development Corp., a medical products firm in Manchester, N.H., won the John W. Hyatt Award for service to mankind. Kamen, who did not attend the lunch, developed the first portable insulin pump in 1978.
In 1993, Kamen created the first portable kidney dialysis machine. He founded Science Enrichment Encounters, a museum for children, in Manchester. He established US FIRST (Foundation for the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a not-for-profit organization to change how people look at science and technology.
Geoffrey Boothroyd and Peter Dewhurst, who developed the concept of design for manufacture and assembly, received the Fred O. Conley Award in plastics engineering and technology. They said plastics, by allowing parts consolidation, helped make DFMA possible. But Dewhurst said mechanical engineers still tend to focus on metals.
``Usually plastics play a very small part in most four-year degrees,'' he said.
The two engineering professors at the University of Rhode Island own a DFMA software firm in Wakefield, R.I., Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc.
Jack L. Koenig, who has taught polymer chemistry for 30 years and is a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, received the Educa-tion Award. He said that he rarely heard the word ``polymer'' when he received his own education.
He became interested in polymers while working at DuPont Co.
``The first course that I formally took in polymers, I taught,'' he said.
He helped CWRU, one of the best U.S. polymer schools, develop its program. In 1972, Koenig became the first program officer for polymer science in the National Science Foundation's Division of Materials.
Koenig won SPE's Research Award at the 1991 ANTEC.
Isaac Sanchez, chemical engineering professor at the Univer-sity of Texas at Austin, received the Research Award. His specialty is the statistical thermodynamics of polymers. He has developed molecular theories and models of polymer crystallization, liquid surface tension of polymer molecules, polymer interfacial phenomena, micro-phase separation in graft and star copolymers, gas permeation through polymers and polymer solution and blend thermodynamics.
In the 1970s, along with Robert H. Lacombe, Sanchez described a new statistical mechanical model for chain fluids. Today the model is familiar to polymer scientists as the Sanchez-Lacombe, or lattice fluid, model.
SPE also presented two Plastics Product Design Awards:
The Industrial Product Design Award went to a module, made by gas-assisted injection molding, that contains all the inside components of a door on the new General Motors Corp. minivan for 1997. Called the Super Plug, the part is molded from 30 percent glass-filled Xenoy, a polycarbon-ate/polyester blend from GE Plastics. Receiving the award were Suresh Shah, senior scientist, and Brian Staser, lead project engineer, at Delphi Interior and Lighting Systems of Troy, Mich.
For the second straight year, the Consumer Product Design Award was won by Respironics Inc. of Murrysville, Pa. The product, the Bag Easy Disposable Manual Resuscitator, is entirely made of plastic. A 20 percent glass-filled PC spring operates in a built-in valve. An inflated, pliable PVC mask hugs the patient's face. Product designer, Bill Kaigler, accepted the award.
