Engines Of Plastic

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30561, 2 October 1964, Page 11

Engines Of Plastic

(Special Cr.rpdt. N.Z.PA.) LONDON. An all-plastics car engine is “a possibility,” according to Professor E. R. Howells, head of the materials science and physical chemistry group of a leading British firm. He said much work had ibeen done in recent years on materials that would be stable at high temperatures. If one of the less ambitious targets in thermal stability was the design of a noninetallic material for use in the internal combustion engine at 200 to 400 degrees Centigrade, “then the answer may quite conceivably come within a decade or so” from a mixture of new organic polymer chemistry and the appropriate technology of fabrication. Such polymers, he said, had already been developed to withstand those temperatures for hundreds of hours. There was, therefore, “no insuperable barrier in principle to such a project.”