Continuous glass fiber reinforced wood plastic composite in extrusion process: Mechanical properties

• The objective of this research work is to introduce wood plastic composites (WPCs) for structural applications.
• Continuous reinforcing in extrusion process was applied to reinforce HDPE–wood flour for different compositions.
• 2, 4 and 6 melt impregnated E-glass fiber rovings were embedded through the extrudate by a special die.
• Dramatic improvement in the tensile, flexural and impact strengths were obtained.

This paper presents an experimental study on the material development where wood plastic composites (WPCs) were reinforced with continuous glass fibers (continuous hybrid WPC) at a low volume fraction. The continuous glass fiber reinforced WPC (CGFR-WPC) were produced in cylindrical profiles via an extrusion process. Experiments were carried out to investigate the effect of wood content, volume fraction of continuous glass fiber and the presence of coupling agent on the mechanical properties of the final products. Three point bending, tensile and impact tests were carried out on the extruded specimens. The results revealed an outstanding improvement in all the mechanical properties, where applying a low fraction of continuous reinforcement via incorporating six rovings of (continuous) fiber reinforcements into the WPCs, maximum increase in flexural, tensile and impact strength were observed to be 2.3, 5.9 and 20 times, respectively. Achieving these large increases in properties via conventional variations in processing and material parameters has not been reported. It is interesting to note that, when applying a larger number of reinforcements, presence of coupling agent in WPCs, exhibited a negative effect on the tensile properties.