Aerospace

Why use acrylic

Produced in the 1930’s as Perspex, cast acrylic sheet and block have properties that make them suitable for a wide variety of applications.

The original application for this new material was as a glazing component in military and civil aircraft. This new material offered design engineers many attractive properties:

• acrylic is half the weight of glass of the same thickness.
• acrylic has excellent optical clarity and light transmission properties.
• acrylic has good flexural strength.
• acrylic has good resistance to breakage.
• acrylic has the ability to withstand temperature extremes at different altitudes.

These properties, linked with further material developments, have encouraged the use of acrylic in a wide variety of applications ranging from precision engineered components to commercial and domestic products.

While everyone is familiar with acrylic and other plastics in an injected moulded form, the high costs of mould tooling can be a prohibitive factor when selecting materials for small volume and prototype production runs. The solution is to opt for a machined component.