When was fiberglass developed

One of the first major applications for reinforcement fiber was printed circuit boards. Found in nearly every electronic device, these familiar green slabs contain E-glass fibers, which consist mainly of silica, alumina, calcium oxide CaO , and boron oxide B 2 O 3 , enveloped in an epoxy resin. In addition to providing high strength and stiffness at low weight, which is typical of all glass fibers, E-glass also combines low values for dielectric constant and dielectric loss, critical properties for insulators used in high-speed electronics, Li explains.

The fibers also resist thermal expansion, which keeps the size of the board constant as multiple drilling and assembly steps build complex circuitry. Despite its name, E-glass also has applications far beyond electronics, making its way into pipes, tanks, and other industrial parts, as well as into products used in transportation and renewable energy.

The boron oxide component typical of E-glass, for example, provides circuit boards with some important electrical properties. Renewable energy uses tons of E-glass—literally. Each of the three meter-long blades in common models of wind turbines contains nearly 3 metric tons of E-glass fibers, Li says.

The fibers impart strength to the blades while keeping them light and responsive to breezes. For standard-length blades, glassmakers address that requirement chemically and physically. When it comes to increasing stiffness, bigger is better. Enter R-glass, an aluminosilicate tailor made for rigidity.

A number of manufacturers make R-glass fibers and keep the proprietary formulation details to themselves. Related: Pushing wind turbine blades toward meters. Decades after first commercializing high-strength glass fibers, manufacturers continue searching for chemical formulations that lead to improved ways of making them. Those findings can benefit manufacturing by reducing the energy and cost of making fiberglass.

They may also improve fiber uniformity, which can minimize breakage during the fiber drawing process J. Alloys Compd. By far the biggest uses of fiberglass are insulation and reinforcing lightweight objects. But a small amount is used for healing.

Missouri-based Mo-Sci developed a nanofibrous bioactive borate glass for animal and human use that heals chronic skin ulcers and deep wounds. The antimicrobial fibers, which gradually dissolve and are absorbed by tissue, release bioactive ions in the wound, which stimulate blood vessel growth and promote tissue healing. In another medical development, Aldo R. Boccaccini of Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and coworkers showed that depositing bioactive phosphate glass fibers in an aligned orientation on metal body implants nudges cells to proliferate in an orderly and directional fashion, which promotes bonding between the implant and bone ACS Appl.

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The power is now in your nitrile gloved hands Sign up for a free account to increase your articles. Or go unlimited with ACS membership. He said yes, and in he did it. The problem with FRP, though, then as now, was that manufacturing methods were too slow for mass production of car bodies. To understand why, look at the stages of molding a part from FRP. There are several ways to form a car body out of fiberglass, but every one of them involves a great deal of handwork. After being saturated with a binder—generally a viscous liquid, something like warm honey—the fiberglass cloth must be shaped over its molds or stamped between them and allowed to cure, sometimes under pressure supplied by a huge inflatable bladder.

Nevertheless, fiberglass car bodies have had passionate proponents for six decades now. Bill Tritt typified the fiberglass entrepreneurs of the postwar era. Born in Pasadena, California, in , he began making fiberglass masts for sailboats in A year later he was using FRP to build entire boat hulls. Tritt, who retired in and currently lives in West Virginia, recalled that Glasspar was building mainly boats when, in , an Army major named Ken Brooks asked him to mold a lightweight FRP roadster body for his home-built sports car basically a war-surplus jeep, which his wife had found too ugly to drive in its unadorned state.

Tritt molded the body over the course of eight months, and the assembled vehicle, with its one-piece pale green exterior, came to be called the Brooks Boxer.

The Boxer and three other custom-bodied fiberglass roadsters were shown at the Los Angeles Motorama, a car show promoted by the publisher of Motor Trend and Hot Rod magazines. Public reaction was positive enough to encourage Glasspar to make and sell FRP body kits.

Soon backyard sports-car fabricators began buying these kits and assembling their own roadsters, in a sort of Boxer Rebellion against Detroit conformity. Unfortunately, the supply of polyester resin essentially stopped as the Korean War dragged on. Then, by a fluke, Tritt heard about Naugatuck Chemical, a company owned by U. Rubber that was shipping barrels of polyester resin from its Connecticut headquarters to a warehouse south of Los Angeles.

Tritt borrowed the Brooks Boxer and drove up to the Naugatuck warehouse. He tried to talk the office manager into selling him a barrel or two of resin. He then walked Tritt out to the parking lot, and when he saw the Boxer, his eyes widened. The next day Ebers flew out to Southern California. Ebers named these cars the Alembic I and II, after an old-fashioned piece of chemical apparatus.

GM, too, had been experimenting with FRP since In late the company built an entire body for a Chevrolet convertible out of reinforced fiberglass. During a high-speed test run the FRP Chevy convertible rolled over. One of the best received was the Corvette. The response prompted GM to begin production of the Corvette. Three hundred were assembled in late , making it the first car from a major manufacturer with an FRP body.

GM was careful to emphasize the term fiberglass , since plastics carried an image of cheapness. Although the Corvette was welcomed enthusiastically and remains a legend, it did not start an industry stampede toward FRP bodies. The labor-intensive production requirements still imposed a heavy penalty.

Yet the Corvette did at least demonstrate that FRP could work as a niche material. So for short production runs, fiberglass seemed ideal. The Corvette body was made of 62 separate pieces. Most pieces were laid up in matched male and female metal molds, a slow and expensive process. Nor were the results all that good. Early Corvettes leaked and had wavy outer skins, and the fiberglass tended to craze and crack along the seams.

The entire body weighed only pounds, roughly a third of what it would have been in steel. If it was hit hard enough, the resulting rips and tears could be repaired fairly quickly and easily.

Both these cars used FRP bodies mounted on conventional steel frames; the first production car with an all-fiberglass unibody chassis and all was the Lotus Elite, an English sports coupe that weighed just 1, pounds. Lotus produced about a thousand of these pretty little cars between and So were deck lids, hoods, inner fenders, headliners, ducts, instrument panels, and seat shells, as well as the reinforcing plies of early radial tires.

Modern vehicles use FRP for such items as interior insulation, seat frames, timing-belt and instrument-panel reinforcements, air dams, spoilers, fan shrouds, leaf springs, fender liners, mufflers, and accessory running boards for pickup trucks and SUVs. Many wheelers have FRP cabs. The military Humvee comes with bullet-resistant fiberglass floor panels and seatbacks.

The Mercedes Sprinter van boasts fiberglass suspension components to reduce unsprung weight, and the Volkswagen T5 Transporter has a fiberglass roof. As far back as the late s Buckminster Fuller conceived of his Dymaxion House, among whose many visionary features was a one-piece molded shower stall and tub.

Some are big, like in-ground swimming pools and filling-station gasoline tanks. Building facades are often made of concrete sheets reinforced with fiberglass. In the acre Silverdome stadium in Pontiac, Michigan, became one of the largest structures ever covered by a fiberglass roof. It collapsed in under a snow load and was replaced with a roof made of canvas reinforced with steel girders. On a slightly smaller scale, the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed and built a series of ovaloid, flying-saucer-like houses out of FRP in the late s.

He called them Futuro. As early as the British architect Peter Falconer specified fiberglass to rebuild the old timber spire for St. In this country, American Structural Composites, Inc.

A company in Pakistan makes byfoot FRP houses, complete with kitchen and bath, for earthquake victims. FRP has been used for some time in the manufacture of things like wheeler truck cabs, motor-home bodies, seats in trains and subways, cases for rocket engines, rotor blades for helicopters and windmills, and many components for aircraft, both civilian and military. It is an important material for modernist furniture, such as Eames chairs, because of its adaptability to flowing shapes. With fiberglass, if you can model it, you can build it.

And, of course, it is widely used in recreational equipment: golf clubs, tennis rackets, surfboards, water skis, snow skis, snowmobile bodies. Costs of FRP materials have dropped steadily through the years, while the price of metals has generally trended upward. In the final stage, a chemical coating, or size, is applied.

Although the terms binder, size and sizing often are used interchangeably in the industry, size is the correct term for the coating applied, and sizing is the process used to apply it. Size is typically added at 0. The lubricants help to protect the filaments from abrading and breaking as they are collected and wound into forming packages and, later, when they are processed by weavers or other converters into fabrics or other reinforcement forms.

Coupling agents cause the fiber to have an affinity for a particular resin chemistry, improving resin wetout and strengthening the adhesive bond at the fiber-matrix interface. Some size chemistries are compatible only with polyester resin and some only with epoxy while others may be used with a variety of resins. PPG believes that in many composite applications, performance can be achieved via size chemistry as effectively as, if not more than, glass batch chemistry.

For example, its size chemistry used with HYBON products for wind blades reportedly achieves an order of magnitude improvement in blade fatigue life by improving fiber wet out and fiber adhesion to all resin types. Finally, the drawn, sized filaments are collected together into a bundle, forming a glass strand composed of 51 to 1, filaments.

The strand is wound onto a drum into a forming package that resembles a spool of thread. The forming packages, still wet from water cooling and sizing, are then dried in an oven, and afterward they are ready to be palletized and shipped or further processed into chopped fiber, roving or yarn.

Roving is a collection of strands with little or no twist. An assembled roving, for example, made from 10 to 15 strands wound together into a multi-end roving package, requires additional handling and processing steps. Yarn is made from one or more strands, which may be twisted to protect the integrity of the yarn during subsequent processing operations, such as weaving. Although the basic glass fiber process has changed little since its commercialization 80 years ago, it has undergone many refinements.

Manufacturers continue to push forward on both fronts see the "Glass Fiber: The Market" sidebars, below in their pursuit of ever-newer applications for fiberglass-reinforced composite. Thirty years ago, glass reinforcements for composites were of mainly two types: E-glass and S-glass. The ASTM standards that regulate glass type definition essentially outline the constituent materials, not the final properties required.

Thus, a change in glass type indicates a discrete composition of raw ingredients, which may include a variety of elements see chart above. Responding to market demands for higher properties, tailored performance for specific applications and lower cost, glass fiber manufacturers now offer a number of more specifically targeted product types.

One example is a trend in E-glass manufacturing toward the removal of boron. Although boron facilitates fiberization see main article, above , it is expensive and produces undesirable emissions. Its removal has reduced cost and ensures a more environmentally friendly glass fiber. Its first iteration, in the s, was a response to a market need for even higher corrosion-resistance coupled with good electrical performance. However, because its original patented E-CR glass was difficult to make, and thus more expensive to end-users, OCV developed Advantex, which is more cost-effective to produce, thanks to a lower-cost, boron-free batch composition and the elimination of scrubbers and other environmental equipment previously required to capture boron emissions.

Other process developments enable the use of higher temperatures, producing higher properties, while reducing the overall energy usage. OCV is converting all of its global reinforcements manufacturing to Advantex, including the 19 Saint-Gobain Vetrotex reinforcements plants it acquired in S-glass also has evolved. Driven by the U. These properties are derived from its composition, though the manufacturing process helps to maintain that performance, as does using the correct size for the polymer matrix in the final composite structure.

This business — a mixture of fine glass yarns and S-2 Glass fiber products — was spun off in as a joint venture with weaver Groupe Porcher of Lyon, France. When the market for fine yarns moved to Asia, the business went into Chapter 11 in and was reorganized and emerged in as AGY Aiken, S. Because its furnaces average 3, and metric tonnes 6. HPB already has been adopted for orthodontics and dental implants, and AGY is pursuing other implant applications, such as orthopedics. AGY claims that S-1 Glass is well-suited for composite wind blades, where its higher properties reduce the amount of glass fiber required as blade lengths are extended.