The Flexibility of Modern GRP Designs

Ever since Stuart Pease combined a different kind of plastic with the Glass Reinforced Plastic (that would be fibreglass, to you and me), the flexible nature of GRP designs was assured. In the United Kingdom, almost every industry has a contract out with a GRP designer. It was the foresight of people like Stuart Pease that made that happen.

While not the only innovator in the GRP mouldings field, Stuart Pease has been in at the ground level of plenty of the industry’s advances – a fact due, in part, to his long term relation with the whole process. GRP moulding first started in earnest in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, or early 1960– and by the mid 1960s Stuart’s own eponymous firm was handling a large majority of GRO designs orders.

As the industry progressed, Stuart and his co workers realised that the light, easily mouldable nature of Glass Reinforced Plastic lent it to mixed moulding with other materials: the ones whose own properties would alter the overall capabilities of whatever finished object the current design process was attempting to achieve. Example: the inclusion of plastics that do not react to certain corrosive or unstable elements, enabled Stuart Pease and his company to create a GRP moulded storage tank that is still used today, to keep flammable liquids safely stored on work sites and in chemical refineries.

Modern GRP designs owe much to this early experimentation. It is easy to forget that the practice of moulding non Glass Reinforced Plastic elements into a GRP solution was not always the commonplace as it is now. It is because of minds like Stuart’s, and the application of companies, that the ubiquity of Glass Reinforced Plastic across engineering, civic building and high end order projects is as complete as it is.

The twin properties that GRP designs seek to exploit are lightness and strength – also expressed in malleability and the ability to hold complex shapes once cooled. A GRP design is able to take a complicated shape and still show uniform stress tolerances through all its axes, making it ideal for projects like roller coaster carriages and fairground rides, as well as for car bodies and boat hulls.

The strength of Glass Reinforced Plastic is entirely due to the slender ropes of glass that are woven into it. The glass in Glass Reinforced Plastic is present on multiple planes and in multiple rotations – meaning, effectively, that fully realised GRP designs have almost limitless abilities to take stress on all their points.

The malleability of a Glass Reinforced Plastic mould comes of course from the plastic. As both plastic and glass are malleable when heated, a mould is easy to create and shape. When cooled, the plastic retains enough flexibility to take the shifting stresses of intended use: while the glass provides the anchors, like the steel bars in reinforced concrete, which take the actual strain.
Modern GRP designs, the natural successors to those first mixed media moulds made by Stuart Pease, and others like him, over 50 years ago, are capable of any use in any application.

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