MECHANICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CONCH SHELL POLYMER MATRIX COMPOSITES

Abstract

Innovative materials have found many applications in many areas of daily life for quite some time. Conventional materials like glass, boron nitrate, silicon carbide and metallic binders belong to the group of ceramic matrix composite materials. Substantial development in the field of polymer composites has been achieved in recent years, so that they could be introduced into the most important applications. These new innovative materials open up unlimited possibilities for modern material science and development. With this in mind, in this work a new polymer matrix composite material is developed with the conch shell material called as aragonite and epoxy resin. Test specimens prepared by in situ fabrication method with different volume percentage of conch shell particles. Mechanical characteristics such as tensile strength, impact strength and hardness values were determined. In addition, microstructural analysis reveals that conch shell materials have a crossed-lamellar microstructure and the angle between two second-order lamellae is 70–90°. Fracture morphologies indicate that crack deflection is the major toughening mechanisms.