Abstract
The stiffness of a composite material is mainly affected by the nature of its phases and its contents, the dispersion of the reinforcement, as well as the morphology and mean orientation of such reinforcement. In this paper, recovered dyed cotton fibers from textile industry were used as reinforcement for a polypropylene matrix. The specific dye seems to decrease the hydrophilicity of the fibers and to increase its chemical compatibility with the matrix. The results showed a linear evolution of the Young’s moduli of the composites against the reinforcement contents, although the slope of the regression line was found to be lower than that for other natural strand reinforced polypropylene composites. This was blamed on a growing difficulty to disperse the reinforcements when its content increased. The micromechanics analysis returned a value for the intrinsic Young’s modulus of the cotton fibers that doubled previously published values. The use of two different micromechanics models allowed evaluating the impact of the morphology of the fibers on the Young’s modulus of a composite.
Highlights
The use of fibrous industrial byproducts as reinforcement for polymer-based composites has increasingly been attracting the attention of researchers
This paper examines the Young’s modulus of cotton fiber (CF) reinforced polypropylene (PP)
As soon as the literature accepts that the morphology of such reinforcements changes noticeably during composite preparation, the study was performed to reinforcements extracted from the polymeric matrix
Summary
The use of fibrous industrial byproducts as reinforcement for polymer-based composites has increasingly been attracting the attention of researchers. The literature shows the opportunity to use agroforestry wastes such as prunings, used paper fibers, or textile byproducts [4,5,6,7,8]. These studies reveal how the nature of the reinforcements has a high impact on the mechanical properties of its composites. The paper actualizes the value of the intrinsic Young’s modulus of cotton fibers, and proposes a series of composites that reuse textile byproducts, and avoids their landfilling or incineration
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