Intro
We all have heard of Polyester. And the first thing that we associate with it is clothing.
When we say clothing, we mostly think of cotton fabric. But polyester is unique among the
textiles available in the industry.
To start, the history of polyester is different from any other research. In the late 1920’s, a
US-based company, du Pont de Nemours and Co, only desired to research large molecules and
synthetic fibers. The research team was headed by W.H. Caruthers to which they discovered,
Nylon, the first synthetic fiber. In 1939, a group of researchers from England took an interest in
the same research and discovered Terylene until 1941. Realizing, du Pont brought legal rights
to produce the same kind of fiber 5 years later. They developed a polyester fiber called Dacron
in 1951.
polyester is made up of plastic fiber. It is made up of two words poly and ester which mean
many and ester respectively. It is a kind of polymer that is made up of individual units linked by
what Chemistry calls ester linkages. Its raw material, petroleum or crude oil, is dug from deep
underground. Since crude oil is a mix of different organic compounds, it is refined and
processed to obtain the building blocks of Polyethylene Terephthalate. These building blocks
are called ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid.
It’s chemical structure is shown as c2h4-c8h4o4, with n denoting the number of monomers.
The manufacturing process of polyester has two stages: pre-polymerisation and the actual
polymerisation. In the first stage, there is a reaction that forms a simple ester between the acid
and two molecules of alcohol, ethane-1,2-diol. In the actual polymerisation stage, that reaction
is heated at about 260’C, under low pressure. In this stage, a catalyst is needed. Only half of the
ethane-1,2-diol is regenerated as the polyesters form and the other half is removed and
recycled.
Polyester resins fuse excellent mechanical, electrical and thermal properties with great chemical
resistance and dimensional stability that help in different fields in the industry. In this light,
polyester properties is unique due to its extreme low water absorption, excellent dimensional
stability, excellent electrical properties, very good heat and heat aging resistance, very low
creep, even at elevated temperatures, very good color stability, and excellent wear properties.
Polyester properties proves that it has big relevance in the industry. It not only proves its unique
characteristics and properties in clothing and packaging, but also in different fields in the
industry.