Mitsubishi Engineering-Plastics Dramatically Improved Environmentally Friendly Flame Retardant Polycarbonate Resins for Optical Uses

Excellent Optical Properties, and Meets Greater Demands for Enhanced Flame Retardancy and Fire Safety

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mitsubishi Engineering-Plastics Corporation (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President Kijima Yasuhiko) used its unique compounding technology to create products of transparent and light diffusing flame retardant polycarbonate resins for optical uses with greatly enhanced flame retardancy, which are environmentally friendly and deliver strong fire safety.

Background
Previous environmentally friendly flame retardant polycarbonate resins for optical use which did not use brominated or phosphorus flame retardants had strong flame retardancy, but needed improved flame retardancy capable of thinner form products. In response to this issue, we used our unique blending and compounding technologies to deliver increased flame retardancy, while maintaining the excellent optical properties, impact resistance, heat resistance, light resistance and formability of previous polycarbonate resins. These transparent and light diffusing flame retardant polycarbonate resins have been added to our product line.

We added these two resins to our product line.

• Transparent grade: UL94 Flame Retardancy 1.5mm V-0 equivalent
• Light diffusing grade: UL94 Flame Retardancy 1.0mm V-0 equivalent

Both of these have excellent optical properties, and enable dramatically improved fire safety in light transmissive cover parts, sheets, films, etc. in the electrical and electronic fields. They are especially suited for transparent and light transmissive covers of LED lights in bulb and tube shapes, which are recently attracting attention for global warming gas reduction and energy conservation.

LED lights has much longer life than incandescent and fluorescent lights. Therefore, ensuring its safety is even more important than for general electrical and electronic equipment. On the other hand, there is still a lack of general standardization and safety standards, and even higher reliability is sought from materials.

Main Properties and Characteristics of these Resins
1. Transparent Grade: EFT Series

• UL94 Standard (vertical flammability): 1.5mmt V-0 equivalent
• Optical properties (ASTM D1003): 88% total light transmittance (less than or equal to 3mmt), haze less than or equal to 1%

2. Light Diffusing Grade: EKD Series

• UL94 standard (vertical flammability): 1.0mmt V-0 equivalent
• Enables a wide range of optical designs from low to high diffusion, by combining with our EFD Series

Each series has injection molding grade and extrusion molding grade, and supports various forms of molded products. We are proceeding with further development for the challenge of flame retardancy in thin forms, by utilizing our own technologies for polymer structure control.

Head Office
Mitsubishi Engineering-Plastics Corporation

1-9-2 Higashi-Shinbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-8520, Japan

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