Since the dawn of mankind, there has been a drive to develop lighter materials to enable transport and ease of use. After the industrial revolution and the subsequent development of plastics, there have been ongoing material substitutions from metal, glass, wood, and stone to plastics and composites of these materials to reduce weight.
A logical next step in hollow glass microspheres evolution was to reduce the weight of plastics. Various, naturally low in density, fillers were first tried with limited density modification capability. In addition, injection or creation of gas in the polymer during the article forming process was also developed and utilized in nonstructural applications such as packaging.
This article comes from sciencedirect edit released
