Bio-based polymers and biofiller polymers are becoming viable alternatives to petroleum-based plastics and offer increase bio-content at the end of service life compared to conventional plastics and rubbers. Advantages of soy flour include being lightweight, low cost, high strength and stiffness but interfacial adhesion poses to be an issue. In this project, soy flour as an additive to synthetic rubber matrix based composites were studied. Surface modification such as acetylation and grafting with PMMA were compared to untreated soy flour composites. In general, untreated as soy concentration increased, the mechanical properties of the composites decreased. In contrast, pretreated soy flour (acetylated soy flour and grafted soy flour) at 10wt% performed comparable to that of the neat rubber and resulted in an increase in tensile stress.
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