Limitations of reinforced plastics in chemical plant

Because of the physical size of the structural components of much chemical plant and the relative absence of standard construction modules, the choice of materials is generally limited by the requirement to reproduce the flexibility of design features which the plant engineer has come to expect from ‘conventional’ materials of construction. In order to comply with such requirements, the fabricator in re‐inforced plastics must, therefore, employ raw materials which offer him the greatest possible design freedom and this in turn demands: (a) Reinforcements which can be draped readily. (b) Resins which will completely bind the re‐inforcement together into a uniform, reproducible mass, and which will convert from the low viscosity (liquid) phase to the solid phase at temperatures which are readily attainable, and with little or no applied pressure.