Chris,
Designing FRP is a bit like using a contraceptive. If you choose not to do the engineering you can end up with a costly surprise.
Geoff
Christopher Wright <chrisw@skypoint.com> wrote:
On Feb 17, 2006, at 3:44 AM, Steve McKenzie wrote:
> That USACE report was quite a good read.
Ain't that the truth. A lot more direct than you'd expect. Since the
days of flying cars and 'futurists' touting nuclear power as so cheap
it wouldn't be worth billing for, I've always been pretty leery about
miracle breakthroughs and materials that would be all things to all
applications. FRP is great stuff for a lot of things, but it's been way
oversold. The one thing to remember about plastics of any sort is that
the material characteristics are strongly dependent on the part you
make it into--the material isn't created until you've created the part.
That makes strength determination a little bit tricky, because you
don't know how strong the part is before you've actually tested a
couple of them. The second thing about plastics is that they're nothing
like as stable as structural metals. Environments which we think of as
benign can be very damaging to plastics, and very small loads can
cause permanent set. You don't simply design something to be made from
plastic without understanding the behavior of the material you're
planning to use, and especially you don't convert from a metal part to
a plastic one willy-nilly.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=oSO-D7oql5v8OMeZU4RusoxhYAmqWF8UK56QrdpI7pcQjfiwmv_VV8Sn77tu-37GNg8mgWu5KYl-AacQG40">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.
.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania1864)
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Received on Fri Feb 17 21:56:00 2006
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