Preparation And Properties Of Charcoal Plastic Composites

With the rapid development of the economy, human requirements for materials aregrowing, currently wood-plastic composites (WPC) on the market exist a lot of shortcomings,especially high-cost and low intensity, which can not meet people’s needs for high-performanceproducts. In this article, the double screw extrusion is used to prepare charcoal-plasticcomposites and charcoal reinforce plastic alloy is put forward for the first time.In this paper, HDPE/UHMWPE/charcoal composites, PP/UHMWPE/charcoal compositesand ABS/UHMWPE/charcoal composites were prepared by the HAKKE minilab, and then therelative performances were analyzed. The main conclusions were as follows:(1) Tensile properties showed that the tensile strength and the elongation at break showedascending trend with ultra molecular weight polyethylene increasing when the charcoalcontent was60%or70%. The tensile strength was as high as89.16MPa and the elongationcould be up to32.05%. The data indicated that the interface compatibility between matrixand enhancement phase was well.(2) The flexural strength of the composites showed that the UHMWPE and the charcoal contentsignificantly improved the bending strength which increased to88MPa. The tests showedthat internal bond strength can be improved by UHMWPE and the charcoal played animportant role in enhancement effect.(3) Thermal expansion properties indicated that the LCTE of the resin was higher than that ofthe composites. In the temperature range (-30℃~80℃), the LCTE of HDPE, PP, ABSwere173.28×10-6ppm×K-1,167.69×10-6ppm×K-1and83.68×10-6ppm×K-1. Comparativelyspeaking, the LCTE of UHMWPE was higher. The LCTE of composites was reduced to arange of65×10-6ppm×K-1~120×10-6ppm×K-1after the addition of charcoal. The dataindicated that charcoal could limit the expansion of the resin.(4) Dynamic mechanical thermal analysis showed that the value of storage modulus ofHDPE/UHMWPE/charcoal composites was higher when adding a small amount of HDPEand charcoal. The higher E’ shows a stronger rigidity. The storage modulus ofPP/UHMWPE/charcoal and ABS/UHMWPE/charcoal showed that bigger UHMWPEcontent lead to a higher E’. The storage modulus decreased with the temperature rising thentends to zero after the glass transition point. Loss factor showed increase then decreasetrend with the temperature rising. UHMWPE could improve the interface compatibility.(5) Collecting and processing the samples after the tensile tests and the SEM images showedthat when without UHMWPE, the charcoal was enclosed by the resin, but there were a lotof voids inside, so the composites showed brittle characteristics. On the contrary, noobvious charcoal powder agglomeration and voids could be observed in the compositesafter the addition of UHMWPE. The images also indicated that the double screw extrusionis an effective method to prepare composites which good interface quality is produced, that good contact is observed (no voids).(6) Water absorption of composites indicated that pure resin was hardly absorb the water evensoaked seven days at room temperature. While there was a significant increase of qualityafter adding charcoal, in other words, the charcoal-plastic quality increase mainly becausethe wood materials absorbed the water.