The Relationship Between Plastic Virginity and Engineering Properties of Wood Plastic Composites
4 Abstract: This study attempted to investigate the relationship between plastic virginity and physico-mechanical properties of wood plastic composites. To meet this objective, wood flour was mixed with either virgin or recycled polypropylene at 40%, 50% and 60% by weight fiber loading. The samples were made by melt compounding and then injection molding. The amount of coupling agent was fixed at 2% for all formulations. Then physical and mechanical properties of composites were measured according to ASTM standard. Then, all the experimental data were collected and analyzed with the analysis of variance techniques and suitable model was selected with the simple's linear regression model. Results indicated that the flexural strength, flexural modulus, tensile strength and tensile modulus of composites of recycled plastic composites were higher than those of virgin plastics. Also, the water absorption and thickness swelling of samples decreased with the increase of recycled plastic loading. Furthermore, optimization processes have been carried out to determine the suitable combinations of plastic virginity variables in order to attain desirable physical and mechanical properties of wood plastic composites.
Wood-polymer composites
provides a comprehensive survey of major new developments in wood-polymer composites - reviews the key aspects of manufacture, including raw materials and manufacturing technologies - discusses pro ...
Factors governing water absorption by composite matrices
The water transport mechanisms in organic matrices were reconsidered in two ways. Attention is focused on solubility rather than concentration in the analysis of equilibrium properties and a model in which polymer/water interactions govern, at least partially, diffusion is proposed. This model allows us to explain a certain number of experimental results, for instance: the fact that the number of sorbed water molecules is lower than the number of polar groups and that it increases pseudo parabolically with this latter; and the facts that diffusivity is globally a decreasing function of hydrophilicity; that its apparent activation energy is generally close to that for solubility, and that it tends to vary in the same sense with structure.