Experimental and Analytical study on the elastic properties of HDPE/SWCNT nanocomposites

The development of new materials which possesses specific properties for explicit engineering applications has proven to be a key issue in modern researches and manufacturing industries. This is influenced by the necessity of novel and advanced materials in the aerospace, automotive, biomedical and other industries. One possible solution for progressive material development is a combination of two or more materials of different properties which results with a composite material of improved properties compared to the constituent materials. If one face of materials in a composite material is at the nanoscale the subsequent material is said to be nanocomposite. In this work, High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) was reinforced with Single-walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWCNTs) nanoparticles at different weight fractions to result with HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposites. The produced HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposites were processed according to injection and compression mouldings. The experimental approach was then used to investigate the effect of the two processing approaches and the consequences of adding SWCNTs nanoparticles weight fraction on the elastic properties of the HDPE matrix. The results showed that addition of SWCNTs improves the elastic properties of HDPE/SWCNTs nanocomposites in both processing techniques. Furthermore, injection moulding proved to be better processing method of enhancing the elastic properties of the nanocomposites compared to compression moulding. Finally, three analytical models were used for validation and it was found that the approximation model and model of Pan gives acceptable predictions linking to the experimental results compare to the rule of mixture model.