Abraham, Thomas N; George,K E(Taylor & Francis, 2007)
[+]
[-]
Abstract:
Short fiber reinforced thermoplastics have generated much
interest these days since fibrous materials tend to increase both
mechanical and thermal properties, such as tensile strength, flexural
strength, flexural modulus, heat deflection temperature, creep
resistance, and some times impact strength of thermoplastics. If
the matrix and reinforcement are both based on polymers the composite
are recyclable. The rheological behavior of recyclable composites
based on nylon fiber reinforced polypropylene (PP) is reported
in this paper. The rheological behavior was evaluated both using a
capillary rheometer and a torque rheometer. The study showed that
the composite became pseudoplastic with fiber content and hence
fiber addition did not affect processing adversely at higher shear
rates. The torque rheometer data resembled that obtained from
the capillary rheometer. The energy of mixing and activation energy
of mixing also did not show much variation from that of PP alone.
Reactive extrusion is an attractive means of polymer processing since the shaping
and reaction take place in a single operation. In this paper we report the silane
grafting of polyethylenes in a single screw extruder. The optimum conditions for
silane grafting, viz. temperature, shear rate, silane and DCP concentrations, were
determined on a torque rheometer and then actual extrusion was performed
using these conditions. The study shows that an optimum low level of grafting/
crosslinking can be introduced into polyethylene during its extrusion for better
mechanical behavior and=or thermal stability without affecting the processability.