The Mechanical Properties Of Polypropylene/Polylactic Acid (PP-PLA) Polymer Blends

Farhana, Masron (2012) The Mechanical Properties Of Polypropylene/Polylactic Acid (PP-PLA) Polymer Blends. Project Report. UTeM, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Polypropylene (PP) was chosen as raw material in this study due to low cost and good mechanical properties. This factor encourages many researchers in many fields of study to choose PP as the material. In the other side, PLA has advantage in degradability because it is classified as a biodegradable polymer under specific condition. The objective of this study is to produce the PP/PLA polymer blends. The purpose of producing this polymer blends is to investigate the mechanical properties of PP/PLA polymer blends by running several mechanical tests such as tensile, 3 points bending and Charpy impact test. In this study, the specimens of PP/PLA polymer blends with difference weight ratio were produced and the optimum weight ratio will be evaluated in each mechanical test that had been done. Other than that, biodegradable test was run to investigate the biodegradability of polymer blends and FTIR test to investigate the bonding of new polymer blends. In this study, the specimens of the PP/PLA polymer blends with the different weight percentage – PLA 5 wt%, 10 wt% and 15 wt % produced by melting compound process. From the tensile test, PP/PLA 5 wt% had higher tensile strength but same Young’s modulus with other blends. For flexural properties, PP/PLA 10 wt% had highest flexural strength and modulus compared to Neat PP and PP/PLA polymer blends. For impact strength, the PP/PLA blends had low impact strength compared to Neat PP. For biodegradable test, PP/PLA polymer blends showed that the blends had ability to biodegrade in specific condition for 8 weeks and PP/PLA 10 wt% showed the highest percentage of weight reduction which was 1.3%. Finally, from the FTIR test, the chemical bonding of PP/PLA polymer blends showed that the blends had combination of chemical bonding of PP and PLA.

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