A Study on Processing Conditions of Thermoplastic Composites with Commingled Yarn

Abstract

Thermoplastic composites have great advantage over thermoset composites in productivity and properties. However, thermoplastic composites have not been used so widely. Several impregnation techniques have been specially developed for thermoplastic composites because of the difficulty in impregnation of their matrices.In this paper, we propose a new impregnating system using a commingled yarn of continuous reinforcing fiber and thermoplastic matrix fiber, in order to facilitate the impregnation process. This yarn consists of glass fiber and Nylon 6 fiber. We are propose a quantitative method to evaluate the commingled state. We fabricated unidirectional composites using the commingled yarn. We performed bending tests and examined the influence of processing condition on the mechanical properties. Furthermore, unidirectional thermoplastic compositing using uncommingled yarn were also fabricated to evaluate the effect of the commingle process. It was clear that the commingled yarn composites hadl excelent impregnation under low pressure and short holding times, with excellent bending properties.