Thermal and Environmental Resistance of Glass Reinforced Plastics

It's common knowledge that glass reinforcement increases room-temperature mechanical properties of thermoplastics by a factor of two or more. But what amount of this increase is maintained after heat-aging the reinforced compounds? Or after exposing them to various chemicals? Here are new data to answer these questions.

Strength, stiffness and other mechanical properties of almost all thermoplastics can be doubled and even tripled by proper incorporation of fillers and reinforcement. Short-term high-temperature performance, commonly measured by deflection temperature, is also greatly increased by fiber reinforcement. These performance advantages, coupled with the economies and advantages of injection-molding production, have opened many new application areas for thermoplastics.