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pps proceeding
Symposium: Injection Molding & Molds
Oral Presentation
 
 

INFLUENCE OF PROCESSING ON THE FIBER LENGTH DEGRADATION IN FIBER REINFORCED PLASTIC PARTS

Willems Fabian (1)*, Bonten Christian (1)

(1) Institut für Kunststofftechnik - Stuttgart - Germany

Fiber reinforced plastics with their weight saving potential are gaining importance due to the influence of sociopolitical topics such as energy efficiency and conservation of resources. In addition to this, plastics are increasingly reinforced by both, short and more often long-fibers for the production of structural components. The high demands on the performance profile in automotive, aerospace and also the sports and leisure sector require a full exploitation of the potential of these materials. Thus an optimization can only be achieved with a precise understanding of the effects that occur during processing. In this work two different component shapes have been produced in a single-stage direct processing procedure on an injection molding compounder and tested for their respective resulting fiber properties. No significant influence of the processing (packing pressure and injection speed varied by 30 %) on the mechanical properties could be determined. However, increasing fiber length at the end of the cavity could be observed as well as an influence of increasing concentration on a significantly lowered fiber length due to higher fiber-fiber-interaction. An influence of a change in wall thickness to the fiber length reduction could only be determined at low fiber contents < 20 wt.-%. For higher fiber fractions the fiber length degradation dominates due to fiber-fiber interaction.