What Is PTFE and Why Its Properties Matter in Industrial Applications
By Logan Jacobs, President, Lanmar Inc. | March 2026 | 4 min read
PTFE shows up in more places than most people realize. It’s on the sealing bar of a heat sealer in a food packaging plant. It lines chemical transfer equipment in pharmaceutical facilities. It insulates wiring in aerospace assemblies. The material is everywhere, and for the same reason: nothing else performs the way it does across the temperatures, pressures, and chemical exposures that industrial applications routinely demand.
At Lanmar we have distributed PTFE products since 1977. The questions we get most often from new customers start at the beginning: what is PTFE, why does it behave the way it does, and why does the construction or grade of a PTFE product matter for a specific application.
What Is PTFE?
PTFE stands for polytetrafluoroethylene. It is a synthetic fluoropolymer built around carbon and fluorine atoms. The carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest in organic chemistry. It does not break down easily under heat, does not react with most chemicals, and does not allow other materials to bond to its surface without significant surface treatment.
Those three characteristics — thermal stability, chemical inertness, and non-stick behavior — define how PTFE performs across virtually every application it is used in. PTFE was discovered at DuPont in 1938 and commercialized under the Teflon trademark. Today it is produced by multiple manufacturers and fabricated into films, tapes, coated fabrics, sheet stock, rod, tubing, and machined components.
Key Properties
Temperature Performance
PTFE operates continuously at up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 degrees Celsius) and handles short-term peak exposures up to 550 degrees Fahrenheit. At the cold end it remains functional down to negative 328 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the few materials that performs reliably across the full temperature range encountered in industrial and aerospace applications.
Chemical Resistance
PTFE resists almost every industrial chemical including concentrated acids, bases, solvents, fuels, and oxidizing agents. For the overwhelming majority of industrial chemical environments it is effectively inert. That inertness makes it the default material in chemical processing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and food processing where the material must not react with or contaminate what it contacts.
Non-Stick Surface
PTFE has a coefficient of friction between 0.05 and 0.10, among the lowest of any solid material. In heat sealing applications that prevents packaging films from fusing to the heating element. In conveyor and material handling applications it prevents adhesive or process material from building up on contact surfaces. The non-stick property reduces cleaning requirements, prevents cross-contamination, and extends component life across all of these contexts.
Electrical Insulation
PTFE is an excellent electrical insulator with a dielectric strength of approximately 480 volts per mil. It maintains those properties across its full operating temperature range, making it a standard material for wire and cable insulation in aerospace, military, and high-temperature electrical applications.
Common Industrial Forms
Coated Fiberglass Fabrics combine a woven fiberglass substrate with a PTFE coating. The fiberglass provides structural strength and the PTFE delivers the non-stick surface, chemical resistance, and thermal performance. This construction is standard on heat sealing equipment across food packaging, medical device, electronics, and industrial manufacturing, and is also fabricated into conveyor belting for food processing and industrial drying applications.
Pressure Sensitive Tapes are used as sealing surface tapes on heat sealers, thread seal tapes in fluid handling, masking tapes in high-temperature finishing operations, and surface protection tapes where a non-stick or low-friction surface is needed. Skived film tapes offer a pure PTFE surface. Coated fabric tapes add tensile strength for applications with greater mechanical demands.
Machined Components including gaskets, seals, bearings, and valve seats are used across chemical processing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, food processing machinery, and industrial fluid handling where metal-to-metal contact is inappropriate and elastomeric seals would degrade under the conditions involved.
Why Grade and Construction Matter
Understanding that a product is made from PTFE is only part of the specification. Coating weight, substrate construction, thickness, and processing method all determine whether it performs correctly in a given application. A thin film tape suited for fast heat transfer on an impulse sealer would fail quickly under the mechanical stress of a conveyor belt application. A heavy coated fabric built for belting would be over-specified on a small production sealer.
The material’s core properties are consistent across all PTFE products. Matching the correct construction to what your application actually demands is where the specification decision lives.
If you are evaluating PTFE products for a new application or troubleshooting a performance issue with your current specification, reach out to us at Lanmar directly.
Phone: 800.233.5520 Email: ptfe@lanmarinc.com
Logan Jacobs is President of Lanmar Inc., a master distributor of high-performance PTFE products including pressure sensitive tapes, coated fiberglass fabrics, and custom fabricated belting, serving industries across North America from Northbrook, Illinois.