technology | LFTs
Right: StarRov products from Johns Manville provide weight savings of up to 66% in LFT applications such as
automotive underbody shields and truck battery boxes
LFTs for piping. “If that application takes off, we could see a significant bump in the growth curve,” he says. Most recent introductions from Johns Manville are
its StarRov 485 roving for LFT PP and StarRov 890 for polyamides. The company says StarRov 485 rovings are easy to unwind and generate little fuzz. Wettability is said to be “excellent.” Benefits cited for StarRov 890 include “excellent opening of the bundle, very fast impregnation and perfect wet-out in various types of PA and PPA, high dry strength and low fuzz.”
for commercialisation in 2017. Comparing requirements in glass for short and long
reinforcements, Melvin notes that the sizing is normally quite different. “When you are producing short fibre reinforced compounds, you don’t have to worry about how the fibre pays out from the package. If you use fibres in LFT production with the same sizing, the strands will stick to each other so much, filaments will break. So the sizing needs to be formulated according to the different processing needs. With LFTs, you need the package to pay out without the filaments breaking. And then you want the rovings to open up quickly when they enter the process, so they get fully wetted.” Melvin says that while polyamides form the matrix of
at least 80% of all short fibre reinforced compounds, the LFT market is very different, with polypropylene taking the lion’s share by a similar margin. “With the pursuit of higher performance applications in high-temperature environments, polyamide-based LFTs may well grow faster than PP types, but they will never have the same market share.” However, Melvin says that at the recent JEC compos-
ites show in Paris, most of his discussions on LFTs related to polyamide types. The trend is being driven by German automobile OEMs, he says. “Europe is leading the charge right now, and the rest of the world will follow.” He also sees potential for polyethylene-based
40 COMPOUNDING WORLD | May 2016
The end for Twintex One particularly interesting technology that could have been a serious contender in the LFT business appears to have fallen by the wayside. Twintex, originally developed by glass maker Vetrotex, was a commingled glass/polypropylene that was produced on modified glass fibre plants. Vetrotex developed a way to commin- gle PP fibres (and later PET fibres) with the glass fibres as the fibres were actually being produced. This was said to enable production of composites with the highest interfacial properties possible. Twintex could be processed on its own, or let down into unreinforced polymers, since grades could be produced with very high glass contents. The product was also suitable for conversion into fabrics that could then be processed rather like glass mat reinforced thermoplastics, GMTs. Twintex later became the property of Owens Corning,
which first licensed the technology to Fiber Glass Indus- tries (FGI) and then sold it to the same company in 2012. FGI ceased trading in 2014.
Click on the links for more information: ❙
www.PlastiComp.com ❙
www.sabic.com ❙
www.sumitomo-chem.co.jp ❙
www.jnc-corp.co.jp (Chisso) ❙
www.solvay.com ❙
www.borealisgroup.com ❙
www.ivw.uni-kl.de ❙
www.easicomp.de ❙
www.polyone.com ❙
www.akro-plastic.com ❙
www.coperion.com ❙
www.sp-protec.com ❙
www.ict.fraunhofer.de ❙
www.leistritz.com ❙
www.dieffenbacher.de ❙
www.sinoalloy.com ❙
www.comacplast.com ❙
www.ppg.com ❙
https://w.owenscorning.com ❙
www.jm.com
www.compoundingworld.com
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