Mechanical and tribological behaviour of coconut shell char reinforced polymer cosmposite

Abstract

Recently conductive polymer composites obtained by filling polymer matrixes with various Carbon blacks were also reported. Particulate fillers of which carbon black is notable example are widely used as reinforcing fillers in polymer industry. These fillers are added to polymers to achieve desirable and enhance the product service qualities. Commercially available carbon blacks are obtained from thermal cracking of natural gas and furnace black produced by incomplete combustion of oil filled stocks. This carbon black is relatively expensive due to its dependence on dwindling supply of crude oil. It is therefore essential to develop viable alternative source of fillers from renewable resources such as agricultural waste, bamboo stem, oil palm empty fruit bunches and coconut shells which are carbonaceous in nature and rich in organic materials. This biomass can be converted into carbon black thereby reducing unwanted, low value agricultural reduces and underutilized crop into useful, high value materials. Increase of environmental awareness has led to a growing interest in researching ways of an effective utilization of coconut shell, from which shell is particularly valuable due to its high contains 70% carbon, 1% ash, 30.1% lignin, 19.8% cellulose and 68.7% hemicellulose. It is felt that the value of this agricultural residue can be upgraded by bonding with resin to produce composite suitable for tribological applications. Keeping this in view the present work has been under taken to develop a polymer matrix composite (epoxy resin) using coconut shell char and to study its tribological behavior, the new hard porous carbon material coconut shell char has been developed by carburizing coconut shell as the main raw material at three different temperature range 600°C and 8000C. The composite are prepared with different volume raction of coconut shell Char. Experiments have been conducted under laboratory condition to assess the erosive wear behavior of the developed composite.