Abstract
This study was achieved to satisfy two goals, the first of which is to treat an environmental problem represented by the disposal of date seeds, and the second is the use of these wastes to improve some mechanical and thermal properties of poly methyl methacrylate PMMA through strengthening different proportions of the powder of date seeds.
 Particles of date seeds were used as a natural strengthening material for PMMA polymer, by mixing the matrix material (resin) with the hardener while still stirring continuously for a period of 10 min. After that, the samples of the reinforced material were prepared by adding the powder of date seeds, which is the reinforcing substance, with different percentages of weight fraction (0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5 wt. %) and a grain size of <75 µm, while continuing to stir (10 min) for a second time. The composite samples were prepared by the Hand-Lay-up method and cut according to the standard ASTM. Thermal conductivity and some mechanical properties, such as impact strength, tensile strength, compressive strength, flexural strength, and hardness, were studied. An improvement was found in all properties at the reinforcement rate of 1-2 wt. %.
Highlights
An important environmental problem in many areas around the world is the accumulation of agricultural plant wastes, due to the lack of enough factories with complete efficiency of waste recycling
The samples were cut according to the required examination, as follows: impact strength as in ISO-179, tensile strength as in ASTM-D638, compressive strength as in ASTM-D695, flexural strength as in ASTM-D790, dielectric strength as in ASTM-D150, thermal conductivity as a disc, and hardness as a disc. 2.4
Thermal conductivity of resins is increased after fiber reinforcement and this increase is expected due to the fiber capacity as a whole for thermal conductivity compared to the base material [10]
Summary
An important environmental problem in many areas around the world is the accumulation of agricultural plant wastes, due to the lack of enough factories with complete efficiency of waste recycling. Date seeds are considered as one of the kinds of plant waste that is characterized by being dry, large-sized and light-weighted [1]. These wastes are a real problem when accumulating heavily near factories, especially when they are burned which causes a serious pollution of the environment, in addition to becoming a shelter for many harmful insects and rodents [2]. Matrix material In this research, PMMA (Evonik/ Germany) was used as a resin solution which is mixed with a hardener by a ratio of 4: 1. Procedure of Composite Preparation The mechanism of hand lay-up was utilized to prepare the sheets of PMMA / date seeds powder composites with dimensions of 20cm×20cm×0.4 cm. The coefficient of thermal conductivity was measured by utilizing lee‟s disk (Griffin and George / England), based on the following equations [11]: K
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