Novel manufacturing process for improving mechanical properties of flax/PP composites

ABSTRACT

Many attempts have been made in the recent past to improve the mechanical properties of flax/polypropylene (PP) thermoplastic composites. Most of these attempts have not been translated at industrial level due to additional chemical treatment process involved. In the present work, needle-punched nonwoven preforms which can be readily used for composite manufacturing was prepared. To improve the interfacial bonding of the composites, a new modified route for composite preparation is proposed. The modified processing strategy implemented to produce flax with polypropylene composite using compression molding machine. The nonwoven preforms were heated to elevated temperatures followed by quenching. The composite samples were then hot consolidated and their mechanical properties were studied and compared with the samples produced by the conventional method. 154, 75, 37, and 9.6% of improvement have been observed for peel strength, compressive strength, hardness, and impact strength, respectively. The reasons for the improvement are discussed in detail using various analytical tools.

KEYWORDS:

• Amorphous
• composites
• flax
• hardness
• infiltration
• nonwoven
• polypropylene
• preforms
• quenching

Acknowledgment

The facilitate rendered by Dr. J. Senthilselvan, Assistant Professor, Department of Nuclear Physics, University of Madras, Tamil Nadu, India

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to acknowledge their thanks to the Anna University for the funding support through the BSR Fellowship, University Grant Commission [F-No. 25-1/2014-15(BSR)/7-288/2009/(BSR) dated 05 Oct 2015], India.