subject: Fiberglass manufacturers – making the world lighter [print this page] Fibreglass, or fiberglass, is one of the world's lightest and strongest materials. Its real name is GRP, or Glass Reinforced Plastic: because it's plastic, it's extremely light; and because it is reinforced with tiny fibres of glass (hence the name fibreglass), it's also superbly strong. Fiberglass manufacturers, particularly the ones that have been involved in the industry for a long time, have developed countless ways of exploiting this dual property of lightness and strength to engineer moulds and components for some of the world's most tricky engineering problems.
To be light and strong is the Holy Grail of almost all engineering. Strength, of course, is always desirable the stronger something is, the longer it lasts, which makes it better value for money. Usually, strength comes at a price. The tougher one builds something, the heavier one is likely to make it. Strong things tend to be dense, mass-wise. Dense things weigh a lot and the more something weighs, the fewer applications it has in the real world. Take cars, for example machines that fiberglass manufacturers like UK based Stuart Pease have been helping to build for a pretty long time now. Performance cars cannot afford to be heavy otherwise they won't go fast enough. But they have to be strong to protect their driver and so that the extreme forces all that speed brings to bear on them won't cause them to break up. A lot of concept cars and true sports cars are made with fibreglass shells which, thanks to the pioneering work of companies like Stuart Pease, are light enough and strong enough to greatly enhance performance without endangering the vehicle's operator.
So how does the material used by fiberglass manufacturers actually work? The tiny glass strands in the plastic (if you hold fibreglass up to a strong light source, you can see them "trapped" in the substance of the plastic) perform the same job that steel bars do inside reinforced concrete. All that force, the turning and twisting, the speed, weight changes and so on, is spread out through and absorbed by the glass fibres. Any shock hitting a construction made of fibreglass, any torsion forces, is and are dissipated through the whole edifice. Once the shock or force is spread so thinly it ceases to be a danger the whole of the object is dealing with it rather than just an impact or load bearing point.
Fiberglass manufacturers, of whom, in the UK, Stuart Pease is reputed to be one of the best (Stuart Pease is certainly one of the oldest fibre glass manufacturing firms in the UK, having started out pretty much when the technology did), have been responsible for some startling civic innovations over the years developing methods of storing all sorts of nasty chemicals and offering the ideal substance for creating heavy use public furniture like sports stadia seats. The miracle material allows them to build strong and build long, safe in the knowledge that the light weight nature of the stuff will get around most engineering problems.
