EVALUATION OF FIBRE LENGTH DISTRIBUTION IN A SHORT GLASS FIBRE REINFORCED PA-6

The aim of this work is to evaluate the fibre length distribution in a polyamide reinforced by short glass fibre. The fibre length and the fibre orientation distributions strongly influence the mechanical properties of short fibre reinforced composites. The sample investigated is a 30GFPA6 (polyamide-6 reinforced by 30 % by weight glass fibre), extracted from an injection-moulded plate. The digital reconstruction of the three-dimensional structure of the sample was obtained by synchrotron radiation micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), a high spatial resolution non-destructive technique. One global and one local method have been tested for the automatic evaluation of the fibre length distribution in our sample. The global method is based on the mean fibre length distribution computed from the Star Length Distribution (SLD), a morphological parameter. The local method is based on a 3D skeletonize function. The results are discussed in the light of the experimental data available in literature.