CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Ground wood pulp is the raw material used in the fabrication of paper products. This product is obtained by direct crushing of wood using different millers, for defibering of wood. The high yield in the production process that this material has (more than 95%) leads to a very attractive price per kilogram (0.3 ). Traditionally, this pulp is used in the preparation of board (non-treated form) as well as paper for newspaper and magazines (bleached form). On the other hand, polypropylene (PP) is a thermoplastic matrix very often used as polymer matrix in the polymer processing. This material has a very interesting the properties/price ratio (0.7-0.8 /kg). In the science of composite materials, the use of non-degradable synthetic fibres has been very spreaded, being fibreglass the most often used reinforcing agent of polymer matrices. This reinforcement presents a production cost higher than 1.2 /kg. Legislative pressure, induced by authorities in order to produce more respectful materials with the environment, introduces new possibilities in the market for the lignocellulosic fibres, from wood of from annual plants. The main problem using such kind of natural fibres is related to their polar character, which is opposed to the apolar nature of the thermoplastic matrices derived from petroleum. This opposite characters lead to poor matrix-reinforcement interphases which damages the mechanical properties of the composite systems. Better compatibility of both components can been induced by addition of coupling agents such as MAH-PP, which produces covalent linkages between the matrix and the reinforcement. In this work, the influence of improvement of the interphase in the mechanical properties, mainly under tensile stresses, by addition of MAH-PP as coupling agent has been studied.

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