Enhancement of strength and flexibility of polymer composites by using glycerol: article

An attempt is made in this research to enhance the strength and toughness by fabricating fibre fillers (rubber leaves) reinforced polymer composites with the presence of glycerol as plasticizers. At first, size of the fibre filler is varying which are 200µm, 300µm and 500µm in order to select the best size to use for the experiment. The research is made by compression moulding of the mixture of polymer composites at 190oC and 4.826 x 106 Pa. The tensile properties of the polymer composite were tested using tensile machine. The aim of this research is to determine the toughness, strength and flexibility of the fabricated polymer composites. The analysis shows that the presence of fibre and plasticizer increased the strength of the polymer composites at filler size of 200 µm. In addition, from the Scanning Electron Microscopic (SEM) analysis, it was found that the filler and plasticizer filled in the porous of HDPE.