ADDITIVES | REINFORCEMENT
Right: The latest Thermo- flow grades from Johns Manville target PA applications requiring high fatigue
performance
support its growth in the Asia Pacific region beyond China, while also expanding capacity to supply its existing customers in Europe and North America.
Polyamide focus At Johns Manville, Karin Demez, Global Marketing and Portfolio Leader for Fibres, says the company’s latest products for PA compounds provide “excel- lent performance in fatigue performance, which become more and more demanding when long-term testing and vibration tests are performed for demanding automotive applications.” She says ThermoFlow 675 short-glass fibres have out-per- formed benchmarking fibres in PA6 and PA66 during fatigue testing by more than 10% and 50% respectively (Figure 3). According to Demez, ThermoFlow 675 chopped
strands yield excellent tensile strength in PA6 after aging for more than 2,000 hours at 190°C. “Those properties enable compounders to continue to develop new solutions for demanding under-the- hood applications in both petrol/diesel engines and new critical electrical components for e-cars,” she says.
Alternative solutions
Development work is continuing on mineral-based reinforcements that may provide alternatives to glass or to other mineral fillers that have only minimal reinforcement effect. At basalt fibre producer Mafic, Head of Sales and Marketing Jeff Thompson says the company has been making good progress in its thermoplastics work. Basalt fibres have a similar structure to glass fibres. It offers chopped basalt fibres in various lengths, as well as rovings, and is pitching them as a lower- cost alternative to glass, claiming they still provide high stiffness and strength. “We are also excited about our new basalt fibre
Right: Basalt fibres from Mafic are among the potential alternatives to glass for polymer reinforcement applications
production facility in North Carolina,” Thompson says. Mafic is targeting furnace heat-up at the facility, which will be the first to produce basalt fibre in the US, for December this year. Mafic already produces at Kells in Northern Ireland, not far from the Giants Causeway, possibly the most famous basalt deposit in the world.
Independent technical consultant Chris DeAr- mitt, who has worked for numerous functional filler companies, points to the high pace of growth in such materials. Notable among
82 COMPOUNDING WORLD | October 2018
recent developments, he says, is a new alternative to wollastonite, the dominant mineral filler in the marketplace at present. Supplier of the new product, called FiberFlex, is Arctic Minerals. “This new amorphous mineral fibre product is just being introduced as an experimental product with samples available shortly,” DeArmitt said earlier this year. “It has a higher aspect ratio than wollastonite to provide superior mechanical properties and unlike wollastonite, it contains no detectable crystalline silica. The main applications are as a reinforcement and to provide scratch resistance in PP automotive parts. Arctic Minerals have a waiting list for first samples.”
Reacting to lignin Another alternative for providing reinforcement that sits on the border between filler addition and polymer blending has emerged from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge in Tennessee in the US. “We are using reactive compounding method to produce new materials based on natural polymer-lignin,” says Armit Naskar from its Carbon and Composites group. “Lignin is historically treated as filler. It is an organic material with branched chemical architec- ture and can be mixed at submicron scale in the polymer matrices to yield materials with outstanding properties.” Naskar recently co-au-
thored a paper reporting on a new class of thermoplastic elastomers created by
www.compoundingworld.com
PHOTO: JOHNS MANVILLE
PHOTO: MAFIC
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