Study of the processing and properties of mixtures of recycled plastics for outdoor applications

摘要

There is an industrial need for the study of the mechanical and physical properties of recycled polyolefins mixed with cellulose fibres from diapers, wood and packaging containing aluminium. The recycling of thermoplastic based residues is economically very interesting for the easy reprocessing of these materials and flexible shaping using conventional moulding processes as injection moulding or intrusion.Various mixtures of these materials were characterized in terms of their constituents and properties determined using 200 mm square mouldings of 10 mm and 5 mm thickness, in view of their potential application in urban furniture. These mouldings were processed by injection moulding and by intrusion that is a method which uses and extruder for delivering the melt directly into an injection mould. The mouldings were tested in terms of theirmechanical performance in impact and flexion.The intrusion process yielded mouldings with properties similar to injection moulding but appeared to be more attractive for requiring lower moulding pressure and thus lighter and cheaper tooling.The morphology of the mouldings, observed by bright field light microscopy showed some contamination and voiding associated to specific processing conditions and moulding size, the thinner mouldings having less voids than the 10 mm thick. The higher voiding in the thicker mouldings was detrimental to the flexural and impact performances of the parts. The coefficient of linear thermal expansion was determined and showed to be sensitive to the percentage of LDPE and fibres in the mixtures. The flexural stiffness of the moulded plates was assessed using the whole mouldings in the 3-point support test and showed the positive influence of the wood fibres and the diaper content in the mixtures. Conversely the impact performance assessed by the Charpy test was affected by the diaper content, but benefitted from the presence of aluminium from the recycled packaging.The prediction of these properties using the law of mixtures for predicting the overall density in the mouldings was not particularly accurate for the mixtures with recycled diapers.