Investigating the effect of silane coupling agent on glass fibre/thermoplastic interfacial adhesion

Akrami, Roya and Yang, Liu and Thomason, James L. (2022) Investigating the effect of silane coupling agent on glass fibre/thermoplastic interfacial adhesion. In: The 20th European Conference on Composite Materials, 2022-06-26 - 2022-06-30.

[thumbnail of Akrami-etal-ECCM20-2022-Investigating-the-effect-of-silane-coupling-agent]
Preview
Text. Filename: Akrami_etal_ECCM20_2022_Investigating_the_effect_of_silane_coupling_agent.pdf
Accepted Author Manuscript
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 logo

Download (781kB)| Preview

Abstract

Fibre coating (sizing) is a key component for controlling interface integrity and functionality, as well as governing long-term performance characteristics of glass fibre composites. Silane coupling agent is the crucial component in glass fibre sizing contributing to interfacial adhesion, and its role needs to be fully understood in order to develop efficient sizing formulations. This study investigates the effect of a number of different silanes, typically used in glass fibre sizings, on the interfacial shear strength (IFSS) when combined with different thermoplastic polymers. IFSS was measured using the microbond test for both bare and silane sized glass fibres. The results showed that IFSS increased by sizing the fibres with silane. This improvement was observed for Polypropylene (PP) in all the applied silanes, whereas maleic anhydride grafted polypropylene (MaPP), polyamide 6 (PA6) and polybutylene terephthalate (PBT) did not show significant improvement in some of the applied silanes.