Evaluation of Static and Dynamic Performance of Glass Fiber-Reinforced Polyester Resin Filled with Clamshell Powder Hybrid Composites

Abstract

The environmental concerns have become more important nowadays especially with increasingly demands of production and manufacturing of structural materials with higher mechanical properties. Composite materials have contributed in some part of the global pollution that cannot be overlooked. Using abundant, sustainable, and eco-friendly natural materials such as the clamshell powder as a filler material in the composites is one of the available solutions to reduce the final production cost and reduce the pollution effects. Therefore, this study intended to use the locally available clamshells as a particle filler incorporated within the polymeric matrix to fabricate particulate and hybrid fiber-particle reinforced composites. The clamshells were crushed to get a powder with an average particle size of about 1 µm. Different weight ratios of these particles (i.e., 2 to 10 wt%) were incorporated into the polyester matrix to show their effects on the mechanical properties (tensile and impact) and dynamic characteristics (fundamental natural frequency and damping ratio) of the clamshell/polyester and woven E-glass/clamshell/polyester composites. The optimum filling content of the clamshell powder (CSP) for each property would be identified. The study showed that adding CSP to the polyester reduced the tensile and  CSP/polyester samples; however, the tensile and moduli increased clearly when the CSP content is 4 wt%. The highest improvements in the tensile were about 22% and 13%, respectively. Maximum impact strength of the CSP/polyester samples obtained when the CSP content equal to 4 wt% with 50% improvement. When incorporating plain-weave E-glass fabric (8-layers with 30% weight fraction relative to the polyester resin), the tensile reduced especially at 2 wt% of CSP. The tensile of the E-glass/CSP/polyester hybrid composite samples increased by 13% (at 2 wt% of CSP) and  with 31% (at 4 wt% of CSP), respectively. The impact strength of these hybrid composites exhibited maximum improvement of 73% improvement when adding 4 wt% of CSP. Regarding the free vibrational characteristics, the 4 wt% of CSP gave the highest improvement in the fundamental. The key conclusion suggests that incorporation of optimum CSP content in the polyester matrix and woven E-glass/polyester composites improved their stiffness and impact strength with acceptable reduction in their tensile. Therefore, these composites could potentially be used in the applications that require low deflection under loading, durable against impact with improved vibrational characteristics at low cost without harming the environment.