Thermosets

Thermosetting plastics are materials that become rigid when they are mixed together with a hardener. Thermoplastics are easy to use together with stiffening materials like fibers.

Thermosets are usually used as a matrix substance together with fibers to create composite products. Composites are a combination of two materials that do not chemically blend with each other. In this way a product can get the best sides of both materials, for example chemical resistance from the thermoset plastic and stiffness from the fibers.

In Finland there are many companies manufacturing composite products with different methods. Here are the most common processing methods for composites,

• Hand lay-up (a manual method to create smaller series of products)
• Filament winding (tanks, pipes and vessels)
• Vacuum infusion and RTM (all kinds of parts in bigger series of products)
• Pultrusion (pipes and profiles)
• Lamination (lightweight sandwich structures)