Erosive Wear Behaviour of Orange Peel Char Reinforced Epoxy Composites

Abstract

The rise of Polymer technology has been indispensable in the last couple of decades. Polymers have proved to be integral part of our everyday life, epoxy or Polyepoxide are some of the examples of polymers used in daily life. But in recent years, the advent of synthetic fillers used in reinforcing epoxy have proved to be the better choice in comparison to Polymer reinforced epoxy. However, over the years the shift has been towards using natural fillers and fibre materials as alternative to synthetic materials. Natural fibres due to their easy availability, abundance, renewability and cost effectiveness are gradually turning out to be an area of supreme interest. In recent years composites obtained by using carbon blacks as fillers reinforcing epoxy has surfaced and is gaining recognition. These fillers are added to achieve various desirable properties. Commercially carbon blacks are manufactured by thermal cracking of natural gas and by incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. But due to the scarcity of these resources, alternative sources like agricultural waste, bamboo stem, fruit’s shell rich, rich in carbonaceous content are gaining importance. This biomass can be converted to carbon black thereby reusing it and making it more valuable. A few scientific research have been done to study the behaviour of natural fibre reinforced composites with respect to the mechanical behaviour of epoxy composites, emphasizing mainly on fibres and their weight percent's inside the composites. Keeping this in mind, the present study has been done to make composites using orange peel char at 500°C and 700°C and study its erosive wear behaviour. The orange peel carbon black has been prepared by carbonising raw orange peel particulate in two different temperature 500°C and 700°C in furnace. The composites are prepared with different weight fraction of orange peel char.