Find out about.......Plastics, Polymer Engineering and Leadership: Design Properties for Plastics Engineering: Key Electrical Properties of Selected Engineering and High Performance Polymers for E-Mobility

Monday, 28 February 2022

Design Properties for Plastics Engineering: Key Electrical Properties of Selected Engineering and High Performance Polymers for E-Mobility

Hello and welcome to a new blog post. Today I present to you selected electrical properties of the most used engineering and high performance polymers. The data can support you during polymer material selection for various electric car applications.

In general, polymers in electric vehicles are used as isolators, insulators, and component housings and find many electrical focus applications such as busbars, connectors, circuit breakers, modules and switches that carry a current. At the same time, the demand for polymers is increasing in several property dimensions such as thermal rating, EMI shielding and thermal conductivity. Also, looking at autonomous driving systems, relative permittivity is a major concern and new plastic compounds are developed to offer solutions (low absorption or reflection of radar signals at 80 GHz [2]). In part design, we see more and more miniaturization resulting in a higher heat exposure to the polymer in use. Thinner walls represent another challenge for polymers to fill all the mould cavity.

In addition, environmental aspects play a key role in the use of plastics too. As already discussed in this post [3], the trinity of thermal, chemicals and time need to be considered since polymers change their behavior if exposed to chemicals and temperature.

Below the table shows the key electrical properties of selected engineering and high performance polymers for e-mobility.