Mechanical properties of palm fibre reinforced recycled HDPE

Abstract

Recently, recycled thermoplastic polymers become an alternative resource for manufacturing industrial products. However, they have low mechanical properties compared to the thermosets. In this paper, an attempt has been made to enhance the mechanical properties of recycled high density polyethylene (HDPE) with chopped strand mat (CSM) glass fibres as a synthetic reinforcement and with short oil palm fibres as a biodegradable (natural) reinforcement. The effects of volume fraction of both synthetic and natural fibres on tensile, compression, hardness, and flexural properties of the HDPE were investigated. The failure mechanism of the composite was studied with the aid of optical microscopy. Tensile properties of the HDPE composites are greatly affected by the weight fraction of both the synthetic and the natural fibres. The higher strength of the composites was exhibited when at higher weight fraction of both natural and syntactic fibres which was about 50 MPa. Date palm fibre showed good interfacial adhesion to the HDPE despite the untreated condition used. On the other hand, treatment of the fibres is recommended for higher tensile performance of the composites. © 2013 B. Aldousiri et al.