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Design guidelines
Engineering plastics as mechanical design materials are becoming increasingly popular in machine and equipment design because design engineers recognise their advantages and economic significance. The use and development of materials is subject to continuous change. This also applies to plastics. Many machine parts that were manufactured exclusively from metal just ten years ago are now made from engineering plastics. We can expect this change to continue in the future - perhaps at an even faster pace than we have experienced to date. This can be attributed to the enormous rise in the number of plastics available with their many different modifications and properties and the possibilities for use resulting from this development. Because of their specific properties, many plastics are equal in many ways to conventional design materials; in some cases, due to their superior properties, they have already replaced them.
The main advantages compared to metals are weight reduction, resistance to wear, good vibration absorption and the fact that plastics are easier to machine. Their high level of chemical resistance and the increasing thermal stability of several plastics, along with the improved recycling possibilities, are further arguments for choosing plastic.
Besides, the task of design engineers in the future will increasingly be to find the optimum material for the specific application while keeping the costs of the product as low as possible.
The experience that Licharz has gained during the last 40 years in manufacturing, processing and using engineering plastics for machine and plant design, as well as in the automotive industry and many other areas, has made LICHARZ one of the leading companies of this type in Europe. Over the years, we have come to focus on applications that are subject to slip and wear stresses.The majority of semi-finished products described here, especially all variants of cast polyamides and finished parts, are manufactured in our plant, or we produce them on cutting-edge CNC-controlled machine tools. In order to make it easier for design engineers and users to determine which plastic is best for their specific applications, we have summarised our experience in the form of material descriptions, and design and machining information in this brochure.