Impact strengths of injection moulded polypropylene long-glass-fibre composites
March 29th, 1994
Paper (5) to the Institute of Materials 6th International Conference on Fibre Reinforced Composites, Newcastle, England, 29-31 March 1994.
Published in Plastics, Rubber and Composites Processing and Applications, Vol 24, No 3 (1995).
S F Bush with F B Yilmaz and P F Zhang
Abstract
A wide series of experiments has been undertaken to measure impact strength as a function of fibre length and concentration, the fibre/matrix interface, and induced fibre-mat structure and matrix properties. Both commercially-available long-fibre polypropylene granules and in-house polypropylene and polyethylene glass-fibre compounds have been used where the interface conditions are known and can be varied. For the fibre-mat structures achieved, notched impact strengths rise with fibre lengths and with fibre concentration, giving in all cases an improvement on the virgin polypropylenes – for some conditions a five-fold improvement at 25% w/w concentration.