Imitation Cheese

25 Sep 2015 | Posted by Andrew Onions

I remember a trip I once made to America, after a long fortnight of business meetings I found myself at another airport willing to purchase another pre packed cardboard sandwich with zero taste for maximum cost.
For some reason or another I remember spending a few moments looking at the ingredients on the sandwich, to my surprise the sandwich had an ingredient called imitation cheese, upon further investigation I then found that the imitation cheese was a processed product that was cheese like in flavour and look, but had no other connection to cheese.. Despite the small print the sandwich was actually being sold as a Ham and Cheese sandwich. Whilst the story may seem irrelevant, there is a striking resemblance to this cheese sandwich and buying rubber sheeting / matting.
All too frequently the marketplace believes they are getting a specific product and in fact they are getting something quite different, a general lack of clarification along with smoke and mirrors that can frequently exist within the polymer market all eludes to create this situation.
In the past weve all heard remarks from the market on what polymer content is and what materials they are purchasing. Weve all heard the classic request can I have a material with 100% polymer content? When the real intended question is can the polymer content be 100% polymer content of a specific compound type?
In a similar fashion we frequently encounter inaccurate comments from the market place where companies have confused the compound polymer content as a percentage versus the polymers specific percentage split.
All of these miss understanding can create a very confusing scenario for distributors, gasket cutters and end users.
Its therefore no wonder that the marketplace frequently encounters product that fails in its application. Many of these failures could be prevented by clearer understanding of the material thats being used and its suitability for its specific application. In order to provide some clarity on this subject we thought it would help our customers if we provided some definition on the differences.

Compound Polymer Content

This is the volume polymer content as a percentage of the compound. Example:- 40% polymer content means that 40% of the compound is rubber polymer.

Polymer Specific Percentage Split

This is the percentage of the polymer type within the polymer content.
Example:- The polymer in this compound is 100% Neoprene (Example of polymer type)