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Smart and strategic vehicle lightweighting is key to helping OEMs improve fuel economy and battery range, control emissions, and maximise efficiency and cost effectiveness. Producing automotive lightweight materials with 3M Glass Bubbles can also go a long way toward meeting sustainability targets and global fuel efficiency requirements.
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For the buildings we use every day, paints and coatings are their first line of protection. Weathering the elements year after year – while keeping down initial and long-term costs – requires the right paint additives and materials. 3M Glass Bubble fillers offer a superior, economical substitute to traditional fillers, enhancing the performance of various paints and specialised coatings.
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In the pursuit of offshore oil and gas, deepwater exploration presents complex challenges due to extreme pressures and temperatures that place challenges on flowlines, risers, and critical equipment. 3M Glass Bubbles can help solve these challenges by increasing insulation and buoyancy, enhancing equipment reliability, and ensuring continuous production in deep-sea operations.
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Imagine lighter-weight vehicles that can travel further on less fuel. More efficient ways to drill for oil and insulate deep-sea pipelines. Paint additives that helps keep homes cooler on hot, sunny days. In all these ways and more, 3M Glass Bubbles are helping a wide range of industrial sectors solve their design challenges and reach new levels of performance and productivity.
3M Glass Bubbles are high-strength, low-density hollow glass microspheres made from soda-lime borosilicate glass. They are nonporous, chemically stable and provide excellent water and oil resistance. Strong enough to survive processing, they can be incorporated into a wide range of polymers for density reduction. Their spherical shape offers a variety of advantages over irregularly shaped additives or fillers as it has the least surface area per volume of any shape. That allows 3M Glass Bubbles to reduce resin demand in a variety of applications—for lower raw material costs.
When used as fillers, 3M Glass Bubbles reduce weight in applications from plastics, thermosets and sheet- or bulk-moulded composites to structural foams and elastomers. All without requiring significant material or process changes, and without compromising the mechanical integrity of the finished product. The resulting lighter weight parts not only have greater consumer appeal, but can also contribute to environmental sustainability through better fuel economy.
The benefits of lightweighting have an obvious impact in the transportation sector, but customers across many industries can benefit from the lower cost of shipping lightweight parts. In addition, some plastics made with 3M Glass Bubbles may be recyclable, and can be re-ground as many as five times with minimal change in properties. The 3M Glass Bubble fraction of these plastics raises few, if any, issues during disposal, because they’re made from an inert glass.
3M Glass Bubbles go far beyond automotive lightweighting materials: the inherent properties of these hollow glass microspheres provide a number of unique performance and processing advantages including improved flow, higher volume loading, high dimensional stability, faster cooling times, solar reflectivity, thermal resistance, buoyancy and more.
Contact us for more information, including formulation assistance or questions about a specific application.
3M™ Glass Bubbles can help customers achieve their sustainability goals by reducing weight and enhancing product properties.
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3M™ Glass Bubbles XLD3000, 22.6 kg/SM Case
3M Stock
B40064630
UPC
00051135718810
Alternative ID
XLD3000
3M™ Glass Bubbles HGS4000, 317 kg/SM Bag
3M Stock
B40064641
UPC
04046719113743
Alternative ID
HGS4000
3M™ Glass Bubbles S15, 210 KG by LG BAG/LG Bag
3M Stock
B40064608
Alternative ID
S15
3M™ Glass Bubbles S32HS 40 kg/SM Case
3M Stock
B5005035032
UPC
04054596228504
Alternative ID
S32HS
3M™ Glass Bubbles S32X
3M Stock
B40064648
Alternative ID
S32X
