Page 16 - Plastics Engineering

Preface to the First Edition

This book presents in a single volume the basic essentials of the properties and
processing behaviour of plastics. The approach taken and terminology used
has been deliberately chosen to conform with the conventional engineering
approach to the properties and behaviour of materials. It was considered that
a book on the engineering aspects of plastics was necessary because there is
currently a drive to attract engineers into the plastics industry and although
engineers and designers are turning with more confidence to plastics there is
still an underlying fear that plastics are difficult materials to work with. Their
performance characteristics fall off as temperature increases and they are brittle
at low temperatures. Their mechanical properties are time dependent and in the
molten state they are non-Newtonian fluids. All this presents a gloomy picture
and unfortunately most texts tend to analyse plastics using a level of chemistry
and mathematical complexity which is beyond most engineers and designers.
The purpose of this text is to remove some of the fears, by dealing with
plastics in much the same way as traditional materials. The major part of this
is to illustrate how quantitative design of plastic components can be carried
out using simple techniques and how apparently complex moulding operations
can be analysed without difficulty.
Many of the techniques illustrated have been deliberately simplified and so
they will only give approximate solutions but generally the degree of accuracy
can be estimated and for most practical purposes it will probably be acceptable.
Once the engineeddesigner has realised that there are proven design procedures
for plastics which are not beyond their capabilities then these materials will be
more readily accepted for consideration alongside established materials such
as woods and metals. On these terms plastics can expect to be used in many
new applications because their potential is limited only by the ingenuity of
the user.