By 2002 the world market for polymer composites was 7.2 Million Tons. The automotive and industrial vehicle industry consumes 25% of the world's composite material output. Composite materials benefit the automotive industry in multiple ways. Regulatory pressure that encourages recyclablity and reduction of energy consumption pushes automotive manufacturers to consider new technologies to meet these environmental standards. The work being undertaken in this research is part of an ED integrated Project under the "Sixth Framework of Research and Development Funding". The project title is "Hydrogen Storage Systems for Automotive Application (StorHy)". Within this project, the Recycling Work Package (WP5) aims to develop recycling techniques for glass and carbon fibre reinforced polymer composite pressure vessels that were proposed for hydrogen storage. This thesis describes the development of a SIze reduction technique for the carbon/epoxy and glass/PP pressure vessels with respect to the particle size and investigates ways of preparing the granulated fractions for subsequent processing. An image analysis technique was successfully developed for the characterisation of the reground material from the carbon/epoxy pressure vessel. The same image analysis technique could not be used to analyse the reground material produced from the thermoplastic vessel. Alternatively, the reground material from the thermoplastic vessel were characterised through a sieve analysis technique. The reground material from the thermoset vessel produced in this work could be processed in a fluidized bed rig which is mentioned in a number of publications. In this work, the reground material from the thermoplastic vessel was successfully processed using an injection moulding machine, with mechanical properties as good as comparable to commercial composites. In this study micro mechanical models available in the short fibre composite literature such as Halpin-Tsai and the rule of mixtures were used to predict the stiffness of the injection moulded composites. The trend observed for the Halpin-Tsai model appeared not to be in a good agreement with the experimental data but the rule of mixtures model was found to predict the experimental data more accurately.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:546472 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Kianbakhsh, Pejman |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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