Abstract
Water immersion was performed on 13 natural rubber (NR) composites filled with varying proportions of carbon black (CB), organically-modified bentonite (M−BNT) and raw bentonite (BNT), to determine the effect of clay loading on the water barrier properties of ternary-filled NR composites. These composites were prepared using a third-degree simplex lattice mixture design of experiment. Specimens were immersed at 80℃ deionized water for 1200 h to measure their percentage water uptake and diffusion coefficient. Results showed that mixing 2.5 phr M−BNT and 2.5 phr BNT to 10 phr of CB provides outstanding water resistance to NR composites. It improved the percentage water uptake by 25.07% and diffusion coefficient by 41.12% as compared to pure CB filler (15/0/0). However, increase in clay loading to pure M−BNT (0/15/0) and pure BNT (0/0/15) led to poor water resistance due to aggregation of fillers. But this observation is less pronounced in M−BNT due to its increased hydrophobicity as a result of organic modification. Contour plots generated from reduced hierarchical models were able to give a graphical representation of the observed results. High values of coefficient of determination with values of 95.40% and 90.15% were computed for percentage water uptake and diffusion coefficient, respectively.
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