Fracture behavior of environmentally friendly polymers and composites

C. BERNAL; M. MOLLO; V. PETTARIN; M.J. ABAD

Merseburg

Conferencia; Polymertec 2016; 2016

Hochschule Merseburg

Environmentally friendly materials refer to those that inflict reduced, minimal, or no harm upon ecosystems or the environment. Biodegradable, fully recyclable and recycled compo-sites are among this kind of materials. In this work, our most relevant results on the fracture behavior of environmentally friendly polymers and composites are presented. Several composites were evaluated. Fully recyclable self-reinforced Polypropylene (PP) com-posites were prepared by film stacking and by hot compaction, by using a random PP copol-ymer (r) as the matrix and commercial non-woven (nw) and woven (w) PP fabrics as rein-forcement. Biodegradable/renewable films based on polylactid acid (PLA) blends were ob-tained by cast extrusion at different draw ratios in order to induce different morphologies. Finally, samples of PP/PE blends reinforced with recycled ground tire particles with different treatments were injected. Different fracture mechanics approaches were applied depending on the materials´ fracture behavior. For completely ductile fracture, the Essential Work of Fracture methodology [1] was adopted, whereas J-Integral at instability (Jc) was chosen to characterize the resistance to unstable fracture in materials that exhibited ductile instability [1-2], as for example self reinforced PP (Figure 1). J-Integral at maximum load Jmax was used as a comparative parameter. Samples fracture behavior was correlated with processing-induced morphologies.