Industry
Automotive & Industrial Composites
Friction compounds, gaskets and ablative composites for demanding thermal cycles.
From EV powertrain gaskets that cycle from –30 to 110 °C to ablative shields on launch vehicles, cork composites do work that synthetic elastomers struggle to match — and they do it without the petrochemical footprint.
Automotive and aerospace engineers ask cork to do two things synthetic elastomers find difficult: stay dimensionally stable across a wide temperature range, and form a protective char rather than melt or drip when exposed to flame. Both come from the same cellular geometry — sealed suberin-walled pockets that do not gas off and do not soften.
Tier-1 suppliers come to us for powder and granulate fractions calibrated to their compounding line. The powder enters NBR and EPDM compounds as a partial mineral filler substitute; the granulates form the bulk of cork-rubber sealing sheets pressed at the customer's site.
On the aerospace side, our coarse agglomerates are specified for composite layups where char behaviour and low density are non-negotiable — the same chemistry, calibrated for a different production envelope.
Applications
Where cork enters the line.
Vibration-damping gaskets
Cork-NBR composites with stable compression set across 1,000-hour thermal cycling.
Friction compound fillers
Fine cork powder as a friction modifier in non-asbestos brake compositions.
Ablative thermal shields
Pure cork agglomerates whose char layer protects the substrate under direct flame.
Typical specifications
Material envelope.
- Operating range
- –40 to 150 °C continuous
- Compression recovery
- >85% after single cycle
- Cell count
- ~40 million per cm³
- Powder fineness
- Down to 100 µm
Products specified for this sector
In production