Material Selection

Smithers Rapra's understanding & experience of how rubber & plastics materials perform in practice is extensive & is based on many years & many thousands of actual industrial examples. This expertise enables Smithers Rapra to provide impartial assessments of the suitability of any given polymeric material for a given application & to highlight where conflicts of requirements might exist which could have an affect on longer-term performance.

At Smithers Rapra our polymer experts have been providing independent plastics & rubber material selection services for over 30 years providing material selection for:

• New product design
• Metal replacement to reduce weight, energy consumption & cost
• Material replacement to meet legislative requirements (Food Contact, Medical / Pharmaceutical, & Reach)
• Substitution of materials / grades phased-out by materials manufacturer
• Cost reduction whilst maintaining functional performance
• Improved performance
• Current material reviews to ensure the most suitable are being used & to establish possible cost savings.

This experience will provide you with the following benefits:

• A limitation of the likelihood of product failure in whilst in service
• Improved product quality & performance
• Selecting the most appropriate material to meet the complex mix of product performance requirements
• A wealth of knowledge covering thousands of previous issues relating to successful performance & possible causes of failure.

Our experts have a complete understanding of polymer material properties & extensive knowledge of their limitations, disadvantages & success/failure modes combined with a practical appreciation of process manufacture & design.

Our knowledge of how plastics & rubber materials perform in practice is extensive, based on many years & many thousands of actual industrial examples. This expertise enables our consultants to provide impartial assessments of the suitability of any given polymeric material for a given application & to highlight where conflicts of requirements might exist which could affect longer-term performance. This expertise supports our independent material selection service which forms part of a comprehensive range of services, allowing informed decisions to be made about material selection for product design, replacement or substitution.

Statistics from our failure diagnostic activities have demonstrated that in the region of 45% of all failures encountered are due to a poor material choice & specification.

In order to pre-empt product failure we strongly advise an independent material selection route. Smithers Rapra has the expertise to make such an independent, objective, informed opinion based on the whole spectrum of generic & sub-generic materials available today.

Smithers Rapra take a wide view of the marketplace & will take into account:

• The ease of processing
• Full cycle time
• Total material costs
• The optimum performance required from the material
• To minimise the risk of premature failure.

The alternative is to leave material selection to the materials supplier, & while the advice given is usually of excellent quality it will of course be limited to those grades in their own product range.