Opportunities and challenges of employing composite materials in switchgear industry

Composite materials have emerged as a necessity rather than compulsion in the present era of industrial applications. This scenario has caused the industry to look for better alternate materials which come at affordable prices to maintain the requisite price margin, besides considering the depleting natural resources of conventional materials. However apart from offering better advantages in terms of lightweight, resistance, ease of maintenance and better environmental protections to name a few it also poses few disadvantages in terms of processing cost and the choice of material. Composite materials provide the opportunity to tailor make product that is specifically adapted to the required performance, and thereby optimizing the price-performance ratio. This paradigm shift can translate only after extensive evaluation of available materials at the design stage aided with required experimental tests. Experimental procedures needs to be extensive as the material properties could be unpredictable in some circumstances. This paper discusses the opportunities available to discover areas of avenues in switchgear industry in particular with panel builders to replace the primitive metallic components with Polymer composite materials. As an instance of a practical application of polymer matrix composite a case study is presented at the end of this paper to demonstrate how polymer composites could be integrated in LV panels innovatively.