The production of fiberglass

Fiberglass (American English), or fibreglass (Commonwealth English) is a common type of fiber-reinforced plastic using glass fiber. The fibers may be randomly arranged, flattened into a sheet (called a chopped strand mat), or woven into a fabric. The plastic matrix may be a thermoset polymer matrix—most often based on thermosetting polymers such as epoxy, polyester resin, or vinylester—or a thermoplastic.

Unlike the glass fiber used for insulation, to make the final structure strong, the surface of the fiber must be almost completely free of defects, because in this way can the fiber reach a tensile strength of gigapascals. If a large piece of glass has no defects, its strength is equal to that of glass fiber. However, it is often impractical to produce and maintain bulk materials in a defect-free state outside of laboratory conditions.

produce

The manufacturing process of glass fiber is called pultrusion. Suitable for the manufacturing process of reinforced glass fiber. Use a large furnace to gradually melt silica sand, limestone, kaolin, fluorite, manganese ore, dolomite and other minerals until they form a liquid. It is then extruded through bushes, which are bundles of very small holes (for E-glass, the diameter is usually 5-25 microns, for S-glass, the diameter is 9 microns).

These filaments are then sizing (coated) with a chemical solution. A large number of monofilaments are now bundled together to provide a roving.

These rovings are then used directly in composite applications, such as pultrusion, filament winding (tube), roving roving (automatic roving cuts the glass into short pieces and drops them into the resin jet, and then projects them onto the mold surface) ), or in an intermediate step to produce fabrics, such as chopped strand mat (CSM) (made by randomly oriented small incision length fibers all bonded together), woven fabrics, knitted fabrics or unidirectional fabrics.