Study of SAWDUST: Methyl Methacrylate Polymer Composite Properties

In recent years, there are concerns for the production of sawdust polymer composites as there is huge amount of sawdust can be found easily and they can easily incorporated with polymers to improve the properties. However, problem arises when the properties of sawdust are influenced by many other factors such as amount of the polymer loading and size of sawdust. Furthermore, the increase demand in using sawdust composites results in a need for a better understanding of the effect of polymer loading and particle size on the characteristics of sawdust composites. So, from this study we will identify the influence of the chemically treated sawdust with polymethyl methacrylate at various particle sizes of sawdust and polymer loading. Apart of that, the research also would like to find out the mechanical and morphological properties which include moisture content, density, flexural, tensile and thickness swelling. These are vital, because we want the composite structure to be durable and to have better properties.
In this work, composite materials were prepared from polymethyl methacrylate with four different size of sawdust (1.99mm ≤ x ≤ 1.18mm, 1.17mm ≤ x ≤ 0.425mm, 0.424mm ≤ x ≤ 0.212 mm and 0.211mm ≤ x ≤ 0.063mm) with three different ratio of fillers (10%, 25% and 75%).
The molding method is used to prepare the specimens of sawdust composite. The mechanical properties studied include tensile and flexural strength where the dimensional stability studied includes water absorption, thickness swelling and density.
The results show that the composite material had lower water absorption compared with raw sawdust. Also for the effect of filler loadings on the composite, increases amount of filler loading gives better mechanical properties to the composite but the percentage of water absorption and thickness swelling are also increases.
Lastly for the effect of particle sizes on the composite, large particle size are found to give better mechanical properties, however the percentage of water absorption and thickness swelling will also increase with an increase in particle size.