Plastics Databases, Electronic

The optimum selection of materials is becoming increasingly important for cost controls and innovation in engineering design. The following databases are tools of choice to help the designer and others meet this need. 

1 Prospector web Prospector Web is an interactive database used to find and compare plastic materials. You can specify your application requirements to search a catalog of nearly all North American plastics and increasing amounts of plastics data from European and Pacific Rim material suppliers. Materials can be searched by any of 200+ properties, reviewed, sorted, and compared to determine the material best fitted to your needs. Test data is available in both English or Metric units and ASTM or ISO format. Both Prospector Web and its sister product Prospector Desktop come with IDES s exclusive Plastics Materials Hotline to help with questions that may arise. 

2 Prospector desktop Prospector Desktop is a disk-based version of the popular Prospector Web. Prospector Desktop also contains multi point data graphs. (Available on CD-ROM or diskette for Windows and Macintosh). 

3 Electronic product catalog Electronic Product Catalog is a sales tool available to material producers and distributors. Potential customers looking for materials can be directed to a website through direct links from datasheets accessed by customers on Prospector Web. 

4 FreeMDS http //www.freemds.cora FreeMDS from IDES (http //www.idesinc. com/Products l.htm) is a no-charge service that provides Plastic Material Data Sheets. This growing database contains over 35,000 Material Data Sheets from North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. 

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Electronic marketplace/E-commerce In addition to the many databases available and person-to-person contacts, E-commerce in plastics has been conducted through suppliers web sites or the dot-commerce independent web sites that link material buyers with sellers in transactions or auction formats. During the year 2000 five plastic producers/suppliers and various elastomer producers/suppliers created a new and important business model of a joint-venture web site. It provides multiple companies to join forces to do business. This is a strategy some observers call competition and others regard as just another form of selling in. an electronic format. Regardless of how it is perceived, the model will help propel e-commerce into the mainstream of processor procurement due to the size and wealth of the companies involved. The plastic model example is the largest online business-to-business site todate. 

Derwent World Patents Index. Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) [76] is a comprehensive database of patent documents published worldwide. It covers over 10 million separate inventions from more than 20 million basic and equivalent patent documents. DWPI is commercially available on the following online services DIALOG, Questel, Orbit, and STN. Pharmaceuticals from 1963, agricultural and veterinary medicine from 1965, plastics and polymers from 1966, all chemistry from 1970, electronics, electrical and mechanical engineering from 1974, and comprehensive coverage of all... 

There is, as always, a need for good quality data. Most of this is now available in electronic form and Chapter 11 lists some of the databases available. In spite of proclaimed good intentions, there is little systematic documentation of the successful application of plastics and their lifetimes, only examples of unexpected failure. There is a need for medium-term, lightly accelerated tests under intermediate conditions to validate the predictive models. While inspection of components at end-of-life is more prevalent than expected, there is a need for coupling it to predictive techniques to validate these techniques and to close the loop of life prediction. 

Companies selling plastics in Europe are obliged to supply technical or data sheets with their products detailing health and safety risks and selected chemical and physical properties. One can search electronically a database of material... 

The discussion in the next section is designed to find conunon features of plasticizers within the same chemical group and to provide information that is snitable for comparison of properties of plasticizers from different chemical groups. This section does not contain information on specific plasticizers. Information on specific plasticizers is included in a special electronic publication on CD-ROM. The CD-ROM database contains specific data on over 1200 commercial plasticizers as supplied by manufacturers as well as a large number of data on chemical componnds which are the components of plasticizers." Both pubhcations - the book and the database - were designed and prepared to complement each other in providing information based on a broad collection of data available worldwide. 

Nowadays, a substantial amount of information is available on the internet, and polymer properties are no exception. Many resin suppliers have data available on their website, and there are a number of electronic polymer databases available. One of the most useful databases is CAMPUS, acronym for Computer Aided Material Preselection by Uniform Standards. CAMPUS has become the most successful and widely used materials database for plastics. More than 25 international resin suppliers provide technical data on their products more than 100,000 copies have been distributed in Europe alone. 

This section of Appendix I, which listed properties of most common plastics, elastomers, and rubbers in earlier editions, has been replaced with information about the four major electronic databases for plastic materials. 

All other chapters in the book have been updated with the latest information, diagrams, and photographs of the test equipment. The Appendix section has been updated. Appendix I, which listed the properties of the most common plastics, elastomers, and rubbers in the early edition, has been replaced with information about four major electronic databases for plastic materials. In order to increase the versatility of the book, numerous color photographs depicting photoelastic analysis and color theory along with various animations have been added on to the compact disk that is included with the book. More importantly, a virtual tour of a prominent Plastics Testing Laboratory is included to give the reader an... 

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