In response to a question from Pierre van der Velden posted as a discussion in the Community of Plastics Professionals group on LinkedIn.
Question: I am looking for a thermoplastic material that has a high heat resistance, low burning rate (V0), high chemical resistance, high impact and low smoke rate. Can anybody advise me?
Comparison Datasheet (pdf)
Hi Pierre,
This search is a good example of a typical search that IDES Prospector Plastics Database can help with. The characteristics you mention are a great start, but as some others have mentioned in the discussion to truly find the right material you may need to provide a bit more information. With that said, Prospector will give you an excellent start and get you closer to that “needle in a haystack.” Here is how you might start your search.
It is always best to organize your criteria into a couple buckets, Must Have and Like to Have. Search first on your Must Haves then move to your Like to Haves. Also, many of the criteria you mention are qualitative rather than quantitative, so that can present a bit of a challenge. I’ll show you a trick later that might help.
The first thing that you can search on in Prospector is UL94 V-0. It is nice to have a thickness, but we’ll just search for all materials that have V-0 at any thickness to start. We can always narrow it down later. We’re starting from 83435 materials and this search immediately cuts it down to 8846.
The remaining criteria are qualitative, meaning that in some cases we’ll rely on the qualitative data, but in other cases we can actually relate the qualitative characteristic to quantitative data to find the best material. Typically speaking, material suppliers report quantitative data more often, so we’ll start there and end with the qualitative.
High Impact – A nice little trick in Prospector is to search on the impact properties, Notched Izod and Charpy Notched Impact with a lower limit of zero. This actually finds all the materials with impact data, usually meaning that it is an important characteristic of the material. Then, later we can sort by these values to find those with higher impact strength. From the 8846 materials that have a V-0 rating, there are 755 that have a Notched Izod and a Charpy Notched impact value.
High Heat Resistance – We’ll use the same technique as we used to find “high impact” but we’ll do it on the Deflection Temperature Under Load and Heat Deflection Temperature properties, which can indicate heat resistance. I did the “lower limit = zero” trick and searched on both 66 psi and 264 psi test conditions, which narrowed the list down to 410 materials.
Now we’ll tackle the qualitative properties, Good Chemical Resistance and Low Smoke Rate.
To find these, you can search the Features property. A quick word of caution about the Features property…not all material suppliers report this fully, so sometimes suitable materials can be overlooked if this data is relied upon solely. My advice is to do two searches, one using Features data, and one without so that you don’t miss any good materials. After all, we’re down to 410 materials, so we can export and sort the data to find a few good candidates, then contact the material supplier(s) to find the best fit. But let’s at least explore the Features search. We’ll search Features for “Chemical Resistance, Good” or “Smoke Emission, Low.” This gives us 38 materials, a very reasonable set to review.
Note: click images below to view high resolution copies.
Property Search
Now we can look at the results table and sort our quantitative properties to find the materials that will work best. We can then do a side-by-side comparison of a few materials and begin to discuss the application with the best few material suppliers.
Search Results
Datasheet Comparing Grades
Now there are undoubtedly many other factors that we can consider, and we should also work to improve the criteria on things like Flame Rating Thickness, but you can see that this system will get you very close and give you the ability to iterate on search criteria until you find the best material.
More information about the Prospector Plastics Database can be found here. The example above specifically uses Prospector's Plastic Material Property Search.
Josh Dorrell
IDES - The Plastics Web®
