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Abstract
Although natural fiber reinforced commodity thermoplastics have a wide range of nonstructural applications in the automotive and decking industries, there have been few reports of cellulosic fiber-reinforced engineering thermoplastics. The commonly held belief has been that the only thermoplastics amenable to natural-fibre reinforcement are limited to low-melting (below 180°C) commodity thermoplastics like polyethylene and polypropylene. However, in three recent papers we have shown that the high-melting engineering plastics, nylon-6 and nylon 66 can indeed be reinforced with cellulosic fibers using low temperature processing with a twin-screw extruder to produce composites of promising structural applications. In this paper we report two additional examples of high- melting engineering thermoplastics, ECM (an aliphatic polyketone) and PBT (polybutyllenephthalate) that can be reinforced with cellulosic fibers using our methods.
Citation
Caulfield, Daniel F.; Jacobson, Rodney E.; Sears, Karl D.; Underwood, John H. 2001. Fiber reinforced engineering plastics. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Advanced Engineered Wood Composites : Bethel, Maine, August 14-16 2001. Orono, ME : University of Maine, 2001
