Abstract
Composites and nanocomposites materials are widely used in the newly developing technology for lightweight but strong materials such as in the automotive, aerodynamic, wind turbine and biomedical industries. The advantage of composites or nanocomposites is that they are made of a combination of two or more materials with distinct properties to achieve a new material with different properties from the constituent materials. This work covers the investigation of elastic properties of polymer-based nanocomposites whereby high-density polyethylene (HDPE) is reinforced with single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) at various weight fractions. SWCNTs nanoparticles are used with polymer HDPE to make composite which has remarkable properties, to enhance the elastic properties of polymer-based nanocomposites. The reason why SWCNTs nanoparticles were used as the strengthening material for HDPE, is because they contain high strength, high melting temperature and are easy to mix with plastics due to their size which is in Nanoscale. On the other hand, polymers are low in strength and lightweight materials which are easy to shape during the manufacturing process and they are inexpensive. Strengthening HDPE with SWCNTs nanoparticles result with a nanocomposite material which is high in strength and low in weight. This composite material holds a great potential to be used in the future for strong but lightweight components application. The objective of the current work was to prepare HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposites using two different processing methods by reinforcing HDPE with SWCNT nanoparticles at the weight fractions of 0 wt%, 0.2 wt%, 0.4wt%, 0.6 wt%, 0.8wt%, and 1wt%. Then investigate its elastic properties at each weight fraction of SWCNTs and the effect of the processing techniques used on the elastic modulus of the composite. Injection and compression moulding were used to process the tensile test samples of HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposites. The investigation was conducted used three approaches which include numerical, experimental and analytical. Numerical results were obtained using the finite element method (FEM) incorporated with represented volume element (RVE) to generate the HDPE/SWCNT nanocomposite model with the aid of ANSYS software. The simulations were made using two density-fractions of HDPE and SWCNTs at the same given weight fractions of SWCNTs nanoparticles per HDPE matrix. The modelled results showed that elastic modulus of HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposite improved by 74 % at the SWCNTs weight fraction of 1 wt% for the density fraction of 1.8 and at the same weight fraction for the density fraction of 2 the improvement was found to be 56 % compared to pure HDPE. This shows that the low-density fraction of SWCNTs fibre and...
M.Ing. (Mechanical Engineering)