Analysis of Thermal and Mechanical Properties of Polypropylene (PP) with Glass Fibre (GF) Composites

Polypropylene (PP) 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 project was conducted to study the mechanical and thermal properties of GF reinforced PP. The type of GF used was chopped strand mat. The mix formulations of GF reinforced PP that had been carried out in this project were 10 wt% GF, 15 wt% GF and 20 wt% GF. Compression molding machine was used for synthesizing process. 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 portrayed an inverse pattern. Besides, analysis of thermal properties showed that the thermal degradation temperature and degree of crystallinity increased with the weight percentage of GF. 20 wt% GF reinforced PP 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 fewer voids content and performed 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 PP were studied. There were significant improvements on PP’s mechanical and thermal properties with the reinforcement of GF.