Reinforced plastic continued thermoplastics

Glass fibres dominate this field either as long continuous fibres (several centimetres long), which are hand-laid with the thermoset precursors, e.g., phenolics, epoxy, polyester, styrenics, and finally cured (often called fibre glass reinforcement plastic or polymer (FRP)). With thermoplastic polymers, e.g., PP, short fibres (less than 1 mm) are used. During processing with an extruder, these short fibres orient in the extrusion/draw direction giving anisotropic behaviour (properties perpendicular to the fibre direction are weaker). 

Thermoforming is another mass production method normally associated with unreinforced or short fibre reinforced thermoplastics, but because of recent developments in reinforced plastics technology, discussed below, there is a greater availability of thermoplastics sheet reinforced by long or continuous glass fibres, so it may become more important for these materials as well. 

The terms reinforced plastics (RP) and composites refer to combinations of plastic materials and reinforcing materials, usually in fiber form (chopped fibers, porous mats, woven fabrics, continuous fibers, etc. see Fig. 7-1). Both thermoset (TS) and thermoplastic (TP) resins are used. When modern RP industry started in 1940, glass-fiber-reinforced unsaturated polyester (TS), low pressure or contact pressure, curing resins were used. Today about 60 percent of the plastics industry uses many different forms of glass fiber-polyester composites. In this chapter the abbreviation RP will be used, and in references to polyester resin it will refer only to TS, as relatively little TP polyester is used in RPs. 

In reinforced plastics various inorganic materials are dispersed in the polymer. Carbon black reinforced elastomers have already been considered see Section 9.16.2. For fiber composites, two subtypes are important, the short fiber-containing materials, which are thermoplastic, and the continuous filament types, which cannot flow. While short fibers can be melt blended with thermoplastics, they are often embedded in monomeric mixes, followed by polymerization in situ. Continuous fibers are always processed via monomeric mixes which can flow over the beds of fibers. Of course, these monomeric mixes may have polymers or prepolymers dissolved in them, raising the viscosity, and reducing shrinkage on polymerization. An example of the continuous filament type is a tape composite, familiar as the strapping tape used for packaging. 

E Glass. A lime-alumina-borosilicate glass specifically designed for production of continuous fibers primarily for electrical applications. This glass has found a great variety of uses in reinforced plastic products. It constitutes the major portion of all continuous filament production and reinforcement of thermoplastics. 

HTPC (Hybrid ThermoPlastic Composite) bumper beams made by Plastic Omnium are used by General Motors on the Pontiac Montana, Chevrolet Venture and Oldsmobile Silhouette. Continuous woven fibres are overmoulded with a long or short fibre reinforced polypropylene to save weight (6 kg), enhance impact resistance (20-40%) and integrate numerous functions such as reinforcement ribs. The process is fully automated. 

Over the past few years, however, techniques have been developed to enable continuous reinforcement of thermoplastics. The simplest way is to put a cloth and a plastic sheet on top of each other in a heated press and to carry out impregnation under pressure. More difficult is the forming of an end-product from the sheet produced with conventional sheet-forming techniques the position of the fibres will be distorted in an unacceptable way. As in nearly all processing techniques, the modern finite-element methods with advanced computers are able to present solutions to this problem in principle they can predict the position of the fibres in the sheet-forming operation, so that optimum reinforcement is realised in the end product. 

Research on the pyrolysis of thermoset plastics is less common than thermoplastic pyrolysis research. Thermosets are most often used in composite materials which contain many different components, mainly fibre reinforcement, fillers and the thermoset or polymer, which is the matrix or continuous phase. There has been interest in the application of the technology of pyrolysis to recycle composite plastics [25, 26]. Product yields of gas, oil/wax and char are complicated and misleading because of the wide variety of formulations used in the production of the composite. For example, a high amount of filler and fibre reinforcement results in a high solid residue and inevitably a reduced gas and oiFwax yield. Similarly, in many cases, the polymeric resin is a mixture of different thermosets and thermoplastics and for real-world samples, the formulation is proprietary information. Table 11.4 shows the product yield for the pyrolysis of polyurethane, polyester, polyamide and polycarbonate in a fluidized-bed pyrolysis reactor [9]. 

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