Polymer composites based on natural fillers are currently attracting great attention as alternative materials to glass or synthetic fibre reinforced plastics in several applications, mostly for automotive, appliance and packaging products. The main advantage of employing natural fibres is that these are biodegradable and renewable, and exhibit low cost, low density and high toughness. However t...

There have been a number of review papers on layered silicate and carbon nanotube reinforced polymer nanocomposites, in which the fillers have high aspect ratios. Particulate–polymer nanocomposites containing fillers with small aspect ratios are also an important class of polymer composites. However, they have been apparently overlooked. Thus, in this paper, detailed discussions on the effects ...

Natural fiber as reinforcement filler in polymer composites is an attractive approach due to being fully biodegradable and cheap. However, incompatibility between hydrophilic natural fiber and hydrophobic polymer matrix restricts the application. The current studies focus on the effects of incorporation of silane treated OPMF into polylactic acid (PLA)/polycaprolactone (PCL)/nanoclay/OPMF hybri...

the principal effects of mass degradation on polymer matrix composites (pmcs) are the decay of mechanical properties such as strength, elongation, and resilience. this degradation is a common problem of the pmcs under thermal cycling conditions. in this article, composite degradation was investigated by measurement of total mass loss (tml) using the taguchi approach. thermal cycling tests were ...

Polymer matrix composites can be severely degraded/damaged under thermal loading caused by fire. Fire degradation of fiber composites is a serious concern in large load-bearing structural applications such as ship, piers and bridges. This paper describes results from combined experimental and theoretical studies of compressive failures of polymer-matrix glass-reinforced composites which have un...

A series of stress corrosion experiments were performed on 12 pultruded glass fiber composite materials (two fibers in six different matrices) commonly used in high voltage composite insulators. In this study two types of glass fibers were investigated, namely Eglass and ECR-glass. The tests were performed in nitric acid solutions (pH 1.2) using constant K I specimens that were specifically des...

Cellulose is the most important and the most abundant plant natural polymer. It shows a number of interesting properties including those making it attractive as a filler of composite materials with a thermoplastic polymer matrix. Production of such composite materials, meeting the standards of green technology, has increased from 0.36 million tons in 2007 to 2.33 million tons in 2012. It is pre...

Magnetoelectric 0-1 composites comprising CoFe2O4 (CFO) nanoparticles in a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer-fibre matrix have been prepared by electrospinning. The average diameter of the electrospun composite fibres is ∼325 nm, independent of the nanoparticle content, and the amount of the crystalline polar β phase is strongly enhanced when compared to pure PVDF polymer fibres. The piezo...

Positron annihilation spectroscopy in lifetime measuring mode exploring conventional fast-fast coincidence ORTEC system is employed to characterize free volume structure of commercially available acrylic-type dental restorative composite Charisma® (Heraeus Kulzer GmbH, Germany). The measured lifetime spectra for uncured and light-cured composites are reconstructed from unconstrained x3-term fit...

We present a simple method of fabricating highly potent dual action antibacterial composites consisting of a cationic polymer matrix and embedded silver bromide nanoparticles. A simple and novel technique of on-site precipitation of AgBr was used to synthesize the polymer/nanoparticle composites. The synthesized composites have potent antibacterial activity toward both gram-positive and gram-ne...