This book is an update to an “authorless” work by the same title. The first edition was published in the early 1990s. A lot has changed in the field since then and a lot has not changed. There are new plastic materials. There has been a huge turnover in ownership of the plastic producing companies. There has been a lot of consolidation, which of course means discontinued products. This update is much more extensive than the usual “next edition.”

It has been reorganized from a polymer chemistry point of view. Plastics of similar polymer types are grouped into nine chapters. Each of these chapters includes an introduction with a brief explanation of the chemistry of the polymers used in the plastics.

An extensive introduction has been added as three chapters. The initial chapter focuses on fatigue, what it is, how it is measured, and how data is presented. The second chapter focuses on tribology properties. The field of tribology is extensive, so this chapter focuses primarily on the measures included in the data portion of this book. The third chapter covers polymer chemistry and plastics composition.

Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 are a databank that serves as an evaluation of fatigue and tribology performance of plastics. Each of these chapters is split into two sections, one each for fatigue properties and tribology properties. Several hundred uniform graphs for more than 45 generic families of plastics are contained in these chapters.

The data in each chapter is generally organized by manufacturer and their product number. Most of the fatigue data is in graphical form. While there are a lot of graphical tribology charts, there are many more tables of tribology properties.

Some data from the first edition has been removed. Removed data includes discontinued products, product names, and manufacturers have been updated.

2009