DuPont Announces Winners

DuPont, Wilmington, Del., announced the recipients of its 2004 Plunkett Awards, who were selected for their degree of innovation, breadth of use and commercial significance with DuPont fluoropolymers. The winners are:• WL Gore for its Elixer Guitar Strings with Nanoweb Coating, featuring a thin layer wrap that gives strings longer life. (First place, Americas region)• Taconic for TacPreg Bond Ply, a composite used in multilayer printed circuit boards. (Second place, Americas region) • WL Gore for Gore Universal Pipe Gasket, a breakthrough gasket that has low creep, high tensile strength and stress-to-seal characteristics. (Third place, Americas region)• Junkosha Inc. for Junflon Hyper PFA Tub, a method of processing PFA to make a new, high-performance PFA tube with low permeability, and increased surface smoothness, light transmittance, dimensional stability and tensile strength. (First place, Asia region)• Chukoh for CGS-500L laminate, a long (up to 1 meter) copper-clad laminate for use in high-frequency strip lines, reducing solder connections for less transmission loss. (Second place, Asia region)• Nippon Pillar Packing Co. for Uniton sliding bearing, a sliding bearing for earthquake isolation. (Third place, Asia region)• Chemplast for Diamond Simulant, a hydrophobid diamond simulant used to evaluate efficiency of recovery equipment and processes. (First place, Europe region)