Testing Time for Tedlar® and Tedmet®!
Recent editions of the BS Stainless blog have been focusing on the many qualities and multiple applications of our innovative Tedmet®, which comprises metal sheets laminated with PVF.
As Tedlar®, the specialised polyvinyl fluoride (PVF) coating created by DuPont™, has been around for well over half a century, it has been put through a rigorous array of tests (both in the lab and in the field) that have repeatedly proven that it can easily live up to the impressive claims made for it. Examples of such tests include
High-Temperature Acid Gas Resistance Test (Case Study)
In the synthesis workshop of a chemical plant, acidic gas is produced at an extremely high temperature as a by-product of the company's operations; this gas causes severe corrosion damage to the steel roof panels of the building that the workshop is housed in. The damage was so bad that the building's owners were forced to replace the roof every two years, resulting in increased costs, disruption and safety hazards.
In 2016, the plant owners decided to replace some of the steel roofing with steel sheets that had been laminated with Tedlar® in a similar process as BS Stainless use to create Tedmet®. Two years later, the old steel parts of the roof had once again corroded while the new roof panel made using Tedlar® coated metal displayed no corrosion whatsoever.
T-Bend Test (In the Lab)
This test highlights how Tedlar® coated steel sheet vastly outperforms steel sheet that has been coated with traditional PVDF. A piece of each of these materials is placed into a powerful vice which bends the sheets to an extreme 180° angle. Even to the naked eye, it is clear that the steel sheet coated with PVDF displays multiple cracks whereas the Tedlar® coated metal sheet has no cracks at all.
To make the obvious point even clearer, the two pieces of steel sheet are then shown under 40x magnification: it can be seen that the Tedlar® laminated steel plate is indeed completely free of cracks.
Visit the dedicated DuPont™ Tedlar® YouTube Channel and check out the product brochure for more details about the results of these and other tests.