Analysis of thermal and mechanical properties of low density polyethylene (LDPE) with glass fibre (GF) Composites

Low Density Polytehylene (LDPE) is known as a low cost engineering plastics
with its outstanding properties. It has been widely used in various industries. Glass fibre
(GF) is one of the well-known reinforcing agents. This research is conducted to study the
mechanical and thermal properties of GF reinforced LDPE. The mix formulations used for
the GF reinforced LDPE are 10% wt GF, 15% wt GF and 20% wt GF by using compression
moulding. By increasing the weight percentage of GF, the tensile strength of the composite
was found to be increased. However, the percentage of elongation at break displayed an
inverse pattern. Besides, analysis of thermal properties showed that the thermal
degradation temperature and degree of crystallinity was increased with the weight
percentage of GF. 20 wt% GF reinforced LDPE exhibited the highest tensile strength and
thermal degradation temperature. In addition, the fracture surface morphology of each
samples were obtained. It showed that with higher weight percentage of GF had less void
content and performs less plastically deformed. Hence, it could be concluded that the
objectives of this project were achieved where the mechanical and thermal properties of
GF reinforced LDPE were studied. It was shown that there were improvements on LDPE’s
mechanical and thermal properties by reinforcing with GF.