Prediction of the elastic behaviour of HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposites with FEM approach

Abstract

Prediction of elastic behaviour of polymer-based nanocomposite using finite element method (FEM) has attracted the attention of many researchers in the past few years. In this study, ANSYS 19.2 software was used to predict the elastic modulus of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) reinforced with single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) at different weight fractions. Three-dimensional (3-D) representative volume element (RVE) was created by FEM using ANSYS software to estimate the elastic modulus of HDPE based nanocomposite reinforced with SWCNTs nanoparticles at 0.2 wt%, 0.4 wt%, 0.6 wt%, 0.8 wt%, and 1 wt% weight fractions. To present the FEM model for predicting the elastic modulus of HDPE/SWCNT nanocomposite, the results from atomic modelling were extracted and used for properties of matrix and fibre interface. The interfacial region was used in the model to separate the conditions of load transfer between the HDPE matrix and SWCNT fibre. Two density fractions of HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposite were also used in terms of two different densities for both HDPE and SWCNT to investigate their effect on the elastic modulus. The modelling results showed that the increase of weight fraction of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) results with the increase of relative elastic modulus of the nanocomposite. The results also showed that the elastic modulus of low-density fraction HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposite improves more compared to one of the high-density fractions at the same SWCNTs weight fraction. Rule of the mixture was also used to predict the elastic behaviour of HDPE/SWCNT nanocomposite and the results were compared to those of the FEM model for validation.