How Fillers Affect the Composites Manufacturing Process
Resins and reinforcements get all the glory, but fillers can have just as significant an effect on the properties of a composites product, says Bob Baker, technical service director at Huber Engineered Materials. “When you sum all the minerals or particulates that are in plastics, it’s a huge percentage of the parts companies are making,” he says. “It tends to be the lowest cost part of the part, so they tend not to pay as much attention to it.”
Baker will co-present an education session titled How Fillers Affect Composites Manufacturing at Composites 2010 in Las Vegas, with a focus on calcium carbonate products. “The whole point is to get people information on the basic properties and qualities of fillers,” he says. “If you’re a minerals user, which almost everyone is, or if you’re a co-supplier to the industry, this is a place where you can pick up some basic information on calcium carbonate. I’m going to cover manufacturing processes, what the differences are, manufacturing techniques, key properties and how they will affect an application.”
For example, Baker says that in a system with a high percentage of filler, different minerals will offer very different performance properties, even if they are the same particle size.
