Fracture behavior of environmentally friendly polymers and composites

CELINA BERNAL; MARIANA MOLLO; VALERIA PETTARIN; MARIA JOSE ABAD; CAREN ROSALES; NOURREDINE AÏT HOCINE

Merseburg

Conferencia; International Scientific Conference PolyMerTec16 - 15th conference Deformation and Fracture Behaviour of Polymers; 2016

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 copo-lymer (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 obtained 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.