Enhancement of strength and flexibility of polymer composites by using glycerol

An attempt is made in this research to enhance the strength and toughness by fabricating polymer composites incorporated with rubber leaves as fibre fillers, and glycerol as plasticizers. The size of fibre filler used in this research was varied at 200µm, 300µm and 500µm to select the best size that can is suitable for the combination of HDPE, plasticizer and filler for the experiment. The composite was made by using hot press to compress the mixture at temperature of 190oC and pressure of 4.826 x 106 Pa. The tensile properties of the polymer composite were tested using tensile machine. The toughness, strength flexibility and surface morphology of the fabricated polymer composites were determined. Results show that the presence of fibre and plasticizer increased the strength of the polymer composites where rubber leaves at size of 200 µm was found to yieldthe tensile strength for 22.1 MPa for formulated M6. In addition to that, image from the Scanning Electron Microscopic (SEM) analysis that the filler and plasticizer filled in the porous of HDPE that resulted in the polymer composite for formulated M6.