Materials Monday: Filling in the Blanks on Prismier

Choosing the right raw materials is a critical step in manufacturing a great product. Of course, you’ll consider pure metals and/or standard polymer classes of thermoplastic, thermoset, and thermoelastic materials. Whether using metals or plastics for your custom parts, there are also plenty of alloys or blends to consider. You’re probably already familiar with many of the metal alloys used throughout history. For example, millennia ago, metalworkers ushered in the Bronze Age when they discovered that adding small amounts of tin or zinc to their crucibles made copper much harder and stronger. Centuries later, some lazy blacksmith neglected to clean his furnace and realized that the bits of charcoal he’d left behind seemed to make the iron much more durable, thus creating the first steel. And far more recently, metallurgists learned that a smidgeon of chromium would make rusty old steel “stainless.” See our blogs Materials Monday: The Big Picture and Materials Monday: Polymers on Parade for our introductions to metal and plastic materials respectively.

It’s clear that alloying elements profoundly affect a metal’s physical properties and resulting performance, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that similar stories exist in the polymer world. In 1862, for instance, Alexander Parkes blended camphor and cellulose to make the notorious Parkesine, a material known for its highly flammable qualities. After this came Bakelite, a mix of phenol and formaldehyde, followed by polyethylene, polystyrene, and nylon, all derived from a witch’s brew of petrochemicals and various additives.

Today, the materials website MatWeb lists close to 100,000 polymers in its excellent online database. The Society of Plastics Engineers shows nearly as many, along with roughly half that number of additives and colorants. Long story short, there’s a polymer for practically every application imaginable, with more coming online daily. This Materials Monday will review some of the more common “alloying” elements, a.k.a. fillers and blends, used to construct this seeming universe of polymers, beginning with colorants.