Fabrication and property evaluation of waste glass dust filled epoxy-hemp and epoxy-flax hybrid composites

Abstract

Glass dust particles, generated in glass cutting industries as a process waste possess health risk and serious environmental issues. This paper essentially reports on exploring the possibility of using this waste glass dust as particulate filler in two different natural fibers (hemp/flax) reinforced polymer composites. Such composites are prepared by hand lay-up route, varying weight percentages of waste glass dust from 0 to 20. The physical and mechanical characterizations are evaluated experimentally. X-ray diffractogram analysis reveals the degree of crystallinity of the composites and the phases present in the raw filler. With the incorporation of waste glass dust, the flexural strength, inter-laminar shear stress and micro-hardness of the composites are improved up to about 52 %, 44 % and 20 % respectively. On the contrary, tensile and impact strengths tend to decrease about 32 % and 17 % with filler content. Using scanning electron microscopy, the possible mechanisms such as fiber-matrix de-bonding, fiber-pullout, matrix crack and rupture etc. are identified for failures of the composites under tensile, flexural and impact loadings. With low crystallinity and fairly good mechanical properties, these hybrid composites can have potential use in thermal insulations and low-load engineering applications.