Short Nylon Fiber-reinforced HDPE: Melt Rheology

Short fiber-reinforced thermoplastics have generated much interest these days since fibrous materials tend to increase both mechanical and thermal properties, such as tensile strength, flexural strength, flexural modulus, heat deflection temperature, and creep resistance, and some times impact strength of thermoplastics. If the matrix and reinforcement are both based on polymers the composite are recyclable. The rheological behavior of recyclable composites based on nylon fiber-reinforced high density polyethylene (HDPE) is reported in this paper. The rheological behavior is evaluated both using a capillary rheometer and a torque rheometer. The study shows that the composite becomes pseudoplastic with fiber content and hence fiber addition does not affect processing adversely at higher shear rates. The torque rheometer data resemble that obtained from the capillary rheometer. The energy of mixing and activation energy of mixing also do not show much variation from that of HDPE alone.