New resins, new attributes

The past decade has seen an explosion of new engineering plastics that have, inch by inch, penetrated into tougher and tougher aerospace applications. Two major suppliers discuss how they approach resin innovation.

One of the attributes of engineering plastics is the ability to create new-or modified-resins to meet specific application needs. Just as plastic pellets can be processed into nearly any net shape, resin mixes, alloys, and molecules can be manipulated to modify their behaviors. Some resin tweaks even appear to thumb their noses at physics, resulting in thermoplastics that resist melting, or ultra-stiff polymers that resist cracking or shattering.

The drawback to these freedoms in both shape and materials behavior is that they do not necessarily give the designer a place to begin. The canvas can be too broad, the paint too bright and various. Plus, more often than not, properties are created not simply by geometry but also by processing. For example, shrinkage and warp resistance is as much a function of how a part is molded, and how a mold is gated, as it is of the shape.