The people at Milliken have let me know about some new advancements they’ve made with Tegris that I thought were worth sharing:

The chief improvement is a new product called Tegris LM. This technology allows Tegris to be molded at lower temperatures and pressures than the original Tegris material. The material that goes into the air splitters for the NASCAR racers is compression molded at 300 F and 300 psi. The new material can be molded at conditions as low as 250 F and 50 psi. On the face of it, this may not seem to be a big deal, but what they’ve found is that this enables Tegris to go into a wider variety of molding processes, including thermoforming, autoclaving, vacuum forming, and filament winding.

This opens up new potential uses for the material, especially in cases where thermoformed or injection-molded polymers may have some limitations, such as with PC and PC/ABS blends. These are widely used in electronics for cases due to their excellent impact and scratch resistance. According to chemists at Milliken, Tegris, however, is around 66% of the density of PC and has better impact performance, particularly on corners. While Tegris by itself has pretty poor scratch resistance, they’ve done a lot of work on co-molding/laminating paint films and other surface effect films to Tegris to provide this function and to add different aesthetics. They’ll have a molding guide available soon.

This work on surface films has also allowed them to co-mold Tegris with carbon fiber/epoxy composites. The guys there have found this a very interesting avenue of work, since one of the key limitations of carbon composites are their brittleness. They think Tegris has some promise here in parts where a typical carbon fiber sandwich panel would be too thick. They’ve made some prototype parts this way and have shown that they can reduce cost and weight of carbon fiber composite panels at equivalent stiffness and while they’re still working on fully characterizing the improvements in impact, they can say with some certainty that the energy required to penetrate a carbon fiber-Tegris hybrid part is higher and they’d expect that the hybrid would be a lot more impact-durable than pure carbon fiber.

That’s all, except to add that the chemists seem like fairly cool guys.

Lori H.

I could write a blog about how I faked being the spouse of a Tesla employee to get a ride in the sedan the other night. Good to see you there!

Lori H.

We’re working on it, but we’re actually quite busy—which is a good thing. Want to be a guest blogger?

We were talking about the developer channel, which is definitely gone. It’s why we bought the thing originally. We had hoped to make the Orb our own — colors, channel, etc.

But, yeah, the standard channels are still there for now. Thanks.

Best,
Lori H.