In the area of profiles for vehicle applications, technical plastic profiles are manufactured in an extrusion process for the automotive industry. The focus hereby is on profiles for automotive glazing.
In the co-extrusion process, up to three different plastic materials are currently simultaneously plasticised and continuously shaped to an endless strand using appropriate tools. Different carriers, for example, adhesion coated metal bands or glass fibres are coated with molten plastic during the creation of the plastic profile.
Metal bands as carriers ensure a high degree of rigidity and plastic mouldability of the bonded profile, and glass fibres limit the material’s typical longitudinal shrinkage.
Currently, mainly polypropylene (PP), polyethylene (PE), a blend of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), polyvinylchloride (PVC), and diverse thermoplastic elastomers such as TPV (PP+EPDM) and TPS (SEBS+PP), are used as standard materials.