Mechanical performance of glass woven fabric composite: Effect of different surface treatment agents

In this paper, mechanical property enhancement of various kinds of surface treatment agent options or combination for glass woven fabric composites was clarified. Initially, heat cleaned glass woven fabrics were treated by silane coupling, a series of pick-up ratios of polyurethane dispersion (PUD) sizing and their hybrid combination (silane-PUD) interface respectively. Moreover applying with thermosetting epoxy resin, both non-treat and treated glass woven fabrics were molded by hand lay-up method. Finally, molded composites' mechanical and thermal properties were systematically studied through static tension test, dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and scanning electronic microscope (SEM) observation. It is found that polyurethane dispersion treated only glass fiber system could achieve better improvement than silane treated only system with increasing pick-up ratio but hybrid sizing treatment for glass/epoxy composite seems superfluous. Based on the DMA results, it is also demonstrated that treated composites displayed deteriorate thermal properties and broader tan δ width.