Investigation on replacement of steel cord reinforcements with continuous and discontinuous carbon fibers in thermoplastic polyurethane based composites materials

Traditional materials like steel have created an impact and, at the same time, contributed significantly towards the growth of industrialization across the globe. Despite being cheap and robust, the steel cord reinforcements often display a fair amount of de-merits which not only pose a risk to health and safety but also reduce the overall stability and performance of the application over a period of time. The critical justification behind these effects are due to various characteristic traits that steel exhibits, such as high density, temperature sensitivity, poor creep and corrosion resistance, etc. Henceforth, the need of the hour is to investigate the possibility of replacing steel cord reinforcements with different types of reinforcements which overcome the negative impact of the steel cords without compromising on the strength. One possible replacement can be synthetic fiber reinforcements. Over the past couple of decades, the emergence of fiber-reinforced composite (FRP) materials have created a wide variety of applications across various sectors of industries due to their high specific strengths. The present research is focused on the high specific strengthened synthetic fibers such as carbon, in continuous and discontinuous forms. The work investigates the potential ability of carbon reinforcements to replace steel cords in Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU) composites by compression molding techniques. In-depth analysis of mechanical and morphological studies show that the fibers can achieve better load-bearing capacities and overall strengths beyond the steel-reinforced TPU. Therefore, these composites have a great potential to be incorporated to a number of industrial applications