Fabrication Polymer Composite With Excellent Mechanical, Electrical, And Thermal Properties

Abstract

Polyethylene (PE) is one of the most common type of polymer, millions of tons are produced every year. PE is a thermoplastic polymer that have vast amount of applications, like grocery bags, bottles, pipes, medical devices, and more. PE is commonly categorized into one of several major types, like Low-density PE (LDPE) and Ultra high molecular weight PE (UHMWPE), one of the most common type is High-density PE (HDPE). HDPE have large range of usage, like food bagging, personal care products, and pipelines for water supply, drainage, and irrigation. The worldwide production of HDPE resin in 2016 was 51.33 MMT and with market value of USD 63.54 billion. Fillers are added to improve HDPE properties, for example, Carbon Black, Talc, and fiber glass. Nowadays, Nanofillers become more and more popular and a lot of research focus on them. Small amount of nanofillers can enhance composite properties better than conventional method. Carbon nanotube (CNT) and Halloysite nanotubes (HNT) usage as nanofillers to enforce polymer start to increase in the recent years. CNT have high strength, stiffness, toughness, aspect ratio, and electrical and thermal conductivity. it is synthesized, expensive and high affinity to each other which increase cluster formation. On the other hand, HNT is natural occurring material, relatively cheap and easy to disperse. It has a good chemical resistivity, mechanical properties and high aspect ratio. Composite of HDPE with both CNT and HNT as fillers should produce a composite with excellent mechanical, thermal and electrical properties with sensible cost. The product should have a longer lifetime as it has enhanced mechanical and thermal properties and electrical properties which enable sensing feature that could be used, for example, in detecting failures of HDPE pipelines. Our research focus is to utilize both CNT and HNT as nanofillers in HDPE to form mechanically robust, thermally stable and electrically conductive composites. The result of this research is promising as there are improvements on both mechanical and electrical properties. Especially, the nanocomposites with high percentage of HNT and low percentage of CNT. The final composite need more toning in terms of concentration of fillers loaded and uniform dispersion of the filler material.

Date of Award	Jul 2018
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Khalid Askar (Supervisor)