ITPN   24979
INSTITUTO DE TECNOLOGIA EN POLIMEROS Y NANOTECNOLOGIA
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
On the use of fracture mechanics techniques to assess the performance of recycled polymer blends
Autor/es:
T. ECHEVERRÍA; A. COSTANTINO; V. PETTARÍN; C. ROSALES; C. BERNAL
Lugar:
Merseburg
Reunión:
Conferencia; PolyMerTec 2021 digital and 17th Conference Deformation and Fracture Behaviour of Polymers; 2021
Institución organizadora:
Selbstverlag der Hochschule Merseburg
Resumen:
Plastic waste accumulation is one of the main environmental problems of the XXI century. Plastics could be seriously harmful for environment due to their slow and complex degradation process. Some plastics are difficult or expensive to separate in individual materials, and then an effort is done in order to recycle them as blends. The difficult task of dealing with blends is to obtain a material with good mechanical properties, since the presence of a polymer dispersed in a second one may strongly change these properties and limit their use in conventional applications. It is then evident that one of the big engineering challenges in recycling thermoplastic blends is to manufacture competitive products in terms of mechanical properties such as toughness or strength, i.e. to upcycling, understanding upcycling as a process by which recycled waste is transformed into materials with improved performance, adding value and widening their application field. Nowadays, most works which deal with recycled blends evaluate mechanical performance by means of conventional mechanical tests such as tensile, flexural or non instrumented impact tests which in many cases are not representative of actual loading situations [1]. In a desire to characterize toughness of ductile polymers, we have turned to fracture mechanics, believing that fracture tests, that imply a more severe loading condition, i.e., load triaxiality, are more adequate to evaluate mechanical integrity of final pieces [2]. Through this work, a complete morphological and mechanical evaluation of different recycled thermoplastic blends is presented. Microstructure and morphology of blends were analyzed by XRD, DSC and SEM. Tensile and fracture tests were carried out on mode I double edge-notched tensile specimens (DDENT) at quasi-static loading conditions. Fracture surfaces were studied by SEM. Results arisen from fracture tests, both qualitative and quantitative, were proven to be a very efficient tool to evaluate the performance of this type of blends.