MANUFACTURING AND CHARACTERIZATION OF THERMOPLASTIC COMPOSITES USING POLYARYLATE/PET ISLAND-IN-A-SEA FIBERS

摘要

Application fields of the fiber reinforced composite have been expanded to various engineering parts such as aerospace, civil engineering, electronics, automotive and etc[1-3]. Recently, many researches have been concentrated on the development of fiber reinforced thermoplastic composites due to their many advantages of short processing time, recyclability, solvent-free process, high toughness and impact properties. Thus, in this study, we tried to develop a kind of fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite by using the PAR/PET island-in-a-sea fiber method. A polyarylate (PAR) is a liquid crystal polymer (LCP) because it has a liquid crystal feature in the molten state, and its chemical structure is shown in Figure 1. When the PAR fiber is prepared by a melt spinning, it offers very high mechanical properties compared with other general fiber due to orientation phenomena during the fiber spinning process as shown in Figure 2. Other advantages of the PAR fiber are great strength-to-weight ratio and dimensional stability. Due to these reasons, the PAR fiber is suitable material for fiber reinforced composites[4-10].