Glass Bubbles

Description

Strength-to-Weight Ratio
The benefits don’t end there; although these hollow spheres have thin walls, they have an isostatic crush strength of 500 psi, making them suitable for a number of buoyancy applications, including additives in buoys and shallow water buoyancy applications (e.g. up to 2,000 feet of sea water). K20 bubbles have a fractional survival rate of 80% or more, at 500 psi for consistent performance in highly filled resin systems.

The unique spherical shape of these bubbles offers a number of additional benefits, including: higher filler loading, lower viscosity/improved flow and reduced shrinkage and warpage. Higher filler loading offers the potential for lower costs. Adding to this product’s versatility is its ability to be easily blended into compounds — making it adaptable to a variety of production processes including spraying, casting and molding.

Buoyancy Benefits and Applications
The ideal combination of high strength and low density has made 3M glass bubbles an industry-standard additive for syntactic foams used in buoyancy modules, buoys or buoyancy blocks for undersea vehicles. When 3M glass bubbles are formulated with resin, the resulting syntactic foam has a high strength-to-density ratio to provide maximum net buoyancy for a given depth rating. The bubbles also produce stable voids, which results in low thermal conductivity and low dielectric constant.