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In today's competitive efforts to continuously improve both material performance and quality, the “designer team” of laboratory scientists and engineers, manufacturing engineers, and marketing specialists must consider the ultimate cost of manufacturing at the very beginning of new product development. One method of controlling costs is by manufacturing new materials using continuous processing methods versus batch processing methods. Although continuous processing is not new to manufacturing, developing high performance material systems adaptable to such methods is still a challenge for chemists and engineers. This paper describes current R & D work to develop gasket materials which can be manufactured by continuous coating or continuous lamination of coiled substrates, e.g., metals, dense papers, etc. The focus of the paper is a discussion of work to relate material properties and performance to chemical structure of the gasket materials.

Standard press lamination techniques cannot meet cost and volume requirements as envisioned for large scale users such as the transportation industries. The concept of metal-to-metal laminates is not new to engineers, but the successful development of continuous processing has now, in effect, served to make available a new material based on a polypropylene core and metallic skins. Various other polymers have been successfully used in the laboratory on a variety of metallic substrates, and this indicates that an entirely new family of material systems is available for exploitation. The total amount of data generated so far by all investigators are limited, but strongly suggest several uses by the automotive, construction and appliance industries and in applications where increases in specific stiffness and/or sound attenuation are of interest.