STM publisher Elsevier has introduced its Chemical Resistance Database: Plastics and Elastomers. Available via Knovel, the database is the industry's largest compilation of normalized data detailing the degradation of plastics and elastomers exposed to a variety of environments and elements. Characterizing the effect of thousands of reagents, the environment and other exposure media, the new database enables organisations to make well-informed decisions quickly-selecting the best plastics and elastomers for a wide range of new product and process design and manufacturing settings across specialty chemical, engineering, design and construction and other industries.
The normalised data is discoverable via Knovel's engineering search capabilities, and users also have the ability to search for materials and substances properties data. The database includes information about both commercially available and ‘retired’ plastics carefully curated from various sources, including commercial catalogues, journal articles, technical reports and materials information datasheets.
The Chemical Resistance Database: Plastics and Elastomers offers: more than 183,000 unique records organised by material category; more than 1,100 material grades representing 226 families, consisting of neat and reinforced and/or filled thermoplastics, thermoset resins, rubbers, and thermoplastic elastomers; resistance data for nearly 5,000 exposure media, including more than 2,800 chemical substances (from water to acetone to sulfuric acid); and details about conditions, such as those that exist during weathering, sterilization, aging and environmental stress cracking.
This new database offers benefits for engineering teams, including saving time and increasing efficiency in the early material selection stage, reducing costs of maintenance and improving component performance. It has wide-ranging applications across industries, allowing engineers to easily select new materials for existing design or components, develop new materials such as engineering plastics for new product applications, reformulate existing material grades with new additives and/or fillers to improve their performance, or understand how specific plastic materials for building materials such as roofing membranes will stand up to harsh environments over time.
