Mechanical and thermal performance of recycled glass fiber reinforced epoxy composites embedded with carbon nanotubes

Abstract

Recycling and reusing of Fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite is gaining a major attraction. In this study, the recycling process is achieved by subjecting the discarded FRP composite materials to the high-temperature environment, which leads to decomposing of thermoset matrix yielding only the fibers. These recycled glass fibers are used in terms of discontinues fibers as reinforcement in polymeric composites. But the strength and quality of the obtained recycled glass fiber composite are lower. It is also inevitable that the interface/interphase of FRP composites plays a vital role in governing their properties and performance. With respect to this, the present article focuses on the mechanical performance of neat epoxy, randomly oriented discontinuous glass fiber/epoxy (RODGE) composite, Carbon nanotube reinforced RODGE (CNT-RODGE) composite, and Functionalized Carbon nanotube reinforced RODGE (FCNT-RODGE) composite. The results revealed that FCNT-RODGE composite possessed the highest tensile and flexural strength, followed by CNT-RODGE, RODGE, and neat epoxy composite. This can be attributed to strong interfacial bonding, which in turn results in better stress transfer. Thermal characterization using Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) was also conducted to obtain the glass transition temperature (Tg) of all the composites experimented in this study. It showed that CNT-RODGE composite had the lowest Tg value. Fractography of the fractured samples was also analysed by Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) micrographs. It revealed the results which were in good agreement with the tensile characteristics.