Development of Non - asbestos Gasket Material 912542

In the consideration of safety to health, many countries have recently been enforsing regulations on the use of asbestos.

To keep abreast of this trend, it has become necessary to replace the gasket materials currently used in the cases and the covers of motorcycle engines with non-asbestos materials.

The gaskets used in motorcycles are subjected to extremely severe sealing loads and temperature in the small and high performance engines. They are required to have excellent sealability and creep relaxation characteristics at high temperature.

Under such conditions, it is extremely difficult to substitute non-asbestos materials for asbestos which has superb material characteristics such as higher heat resistance and greater aspect ratio (length of fiber/dia.).

In consideration of the above, this study was made to conduct a basic analysis of sealing function of the gaskets, and to examine the construction of the gaskets, the construction of the gasket materials and the mixing of the constituents. This resulted in the successful development of non-asbestos gasket material with a sealing performance equal to or better than the conventional asbestos materials.