Thermoplastics as Engineering Materials: The Mechanics, Materials, Design, Processing Link

While the use of plastics has been growing at a significant pace because of weight reduction, ease of fabrication of complex shapes, and cost reduction resulting from function integration, the engineering applications of plastics have only become important in the past fifteen years. An inadequate understanding of the mechanics issues underlying the close coupling among the design, the processing (fabrication), and the assembly with these materials is a barrier to their use in structural applications. Recent progress on some issues relating to the engineering uses of plastics is surveyed, highlighting the need for a better understanding of plastics and how processing affects the performance of plastic parts. Topics addressed include the large deformation behavior of ductile resins, fiber orientation in chopped-fiber filled materials, structural foams, random glass mat composites, modeling of thickness distributions in blow-molded and thermoformed parts, dimensional stability (shrinkage, warpage, and residual stresses) in injection-molded parts, and welding of thermoplastics.

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