Designing for Chemical and Thermal Resistance with Polyphenylene Sulfide (PPS) Compounds

Automotive designers and engineers are requiring greater performance from all components that go into today's automobile. Materials must be able to meet those higher performance requirements, but not increase cost in a price sensitive market.

Resistance to automotive fluids, and particularly the new generation of alcohol-based fuels, is essential to today's engineering materials. PPS materials have displayed excellent resistance to a wide variety of chemicals, including automotive fluids.

This paper will discuss the resistance of PPS, including the new toughened PPS compounds, to this wide range of automotive fluids, including alcohol-based fuels such as M30 and M85. It will also discuss guidelines for engineering applications based on the fluid resistance data and thermal property data. All of this information shows that the challenges and problems posed by applications with long-term elevated temperature exposure to automotive fluids can be met and overcome by the use of PPS compounds. PPS compounds have excellent chemical resistance to nearly all automotive fluids and have excellent mechanical properties at elevated temperatures.