High Strength Glass Fibers
- Introduction
Ancient Egyptians made containers of coarse fibers drawn from heats oftened glass. The French scientist, Reaumur, considered the potential of forming fine glass fibers for woven glass articles as early as the 18th century. Continuous glass fibers were first manufactured in substantial quantities by Owens Corning Textile Products in the 1930’s for high temperature electrical applications Revolutionary and evolutionary technology continues to improve manufacturing processes for continuous glass fiber production, illustrated.
- Glass Fiber Chemical Compositions
Chemical composition variation within a glass type is from differences in the available glass batch raw materials, or in the melting and forming processes,or from different environmental constraints at the manufacturing site.
These compositional fluctuations do not significantly alter the physical or chemical properties of the glass type. Very tight control is maintained within a given production facility to achieve consistency in the glass composition for production capability and efficiency.
- Glass Fiber Properties
Glass fiber properties, such as tensile strength, Young’s modulus,and chemical durability, are measured on the fibers directly.
Other properties, such as dielectric constant, dissipation factor, dielectric strength, volume/surface resistivities, and thermal expansion, are measured on glass that has been formed into a bulk sample and annealed (heat treated) to relieve forming stresses. Properties such as density and refractive index are measured on both fibers and bulk samples, in annealed or unannealed form. The properties presented in Tables 2 and 3 are representative of the compositional ranges in Table 1 and correspond to the following overview of glass fiber properties.
table 1: Composition Ranges for Glass Fibers
Table 2 Properties of Glass Fibers:
Table 3 Properties of Glass Fibers:
Table 4 Glass Fiber Size Chemistry Summary :
