Elastic and Thermal Analysis of Clay/Polymer Nanocomposite Material

Abstract

Composites are the new type of emerging material that promise the improved properties. The mechanical properties of nanocomposites are achieved by the reinforcement of fiber into the matrix. In the present days every industry need to develop a new class of material with improved mechanical properties, low weight, high wear resistance etc. The basic objective of the nanocomposite to optimize its design to develop new cost efficient material. This work gives a methodology of finding effective elastic properties of nano-clay-reinforced polymer composites with aligned and randomly oriented clay platelets. When interphase regions exist between nanoclay platelets and polymer, numerical homogenization is initially required to identify the properties of effective particle consisting of both clay and interface regions. Once the elastic properties of equivalent particle are obtained, empirical methods like Mori-Tanka and Halpin-Tsai approach are employed to identify all the effective properties of resultant composite. The methodology is implemented with a modular based computer program developed in MATLAB and the variation of longitudinal modulus as a function of weight fraction of nanoclay, aspect ratio of fibers, number of stacks, nanoclay volume fraction etc is reported. In this work, mechanical reinforcement of MMT clay platelets in widely used nylon-6 and MXD6 polymer matrices is employed. As second computational approach, the effective elastic properties of clay/polymer nanocomposite for uniform and randomly oriented clay particles are determined by using 3D cylindrical and 2D square representative volume element (RVE) method respectively. The effect of the volume fraction of nano-clay platelets on the mechanical behavior of RVEs was studied. Large surface area of nano-clay platelets contributes the stiffening effect of nanocomposite. As next study,CNT polymer composite reinforced with nanoclay platelets is considered and the analysis of this hybrid composite is attempted again in two ways (micromechanical modeling and by finite element method). The micromechanical results are validated with the finite element result and with published data. An experimental study is conducted on thin samples of polymer and polymer nanoclay composites to test the tensile and flexural modulus.