A Voronoi-diagram analysis of the microstructures in bulk-molding compounds and its correlation with the mechanical properties

Abstract

Abstract. Voronoi analysis is implemented to assess the influence of fiber content on the microstructure and mechanical properties of bulk-molding compounds containing different weight fractions of E-glass fibers (EGF) (5-20 wt%). The fiber distribution in the polymer matrix is analyzed by scanning electron microscopy followed by the Voronoi tessellations, radial distribution function and statistical calculations. The experimental results are compared to modelled microstructures. The derived microstructural descriptors allow us to correlate the fiber weight content and the degree of fiber distribution homogeneity with the mechanical properties of EGF-reinforced composites. The distribution of fibers in composites with 10 and 15 wt% of fibers could be considered as the most homogeneous. This is in a good agreement with the results of the flexural strength and dynamic mechanical analyses, which confirmed that the latter samples exhibit the highest level of reinforcement.

Investigation of adhesive wear properties of glass fiber reinforced polyester composites having different chemical compositions

“…In the studies carried out in the literature, the CaCO 3 use is between 40 and 80 wt%. 18,19,21 In our study, after using orthophthalic polyester resin, glass fibers, alumina, and GB, the remaining parts of the BMC component were completed with CaCO 3 (5–20 µm) filling material ranging from 30 to 68 wt%.…”

“…The orthophthalic polyester resin is used in a BMC composition at a minimum rate of 20 wt% in this study. Bertoncelj et al 18 investigated in their studies the mechanical properties of the BMC components containing glass fiber reinforcement in different proportions using 21 wt% UP resin. Consistent with the references given in this study, it has been observed that the use of 20 wt% polyester resin is sufficient for its wet ability in composite material.…”

Characterisation and improvement of the quality of mixing of recycled thermoplastic composites

“…The first two aspects of segregation were continuously measured in various fields related to spatial statistics [11][12][13] by adapting the measurement methods for IoS and SoS to specific situations. IoS and SoS are particularly well-suited for the mixing of discontinuous-fibre composites and have been studied by various authors [13,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] . The latter three aspects of segregation -namely exposure, density and centralisationhave been scarcely used for fibre composites and polymer blends.…”

“…Several researchers characterised the QoM of discontinuous-fibre composites based on photographs (made by optical or electron microscopes) using the Delaunay triangulation or its dual graph, the Voronoi diagram [21][22][23][24][25][26] . Voronoi diagrams are constructed on the centroids of the particles, from which several statistical quantities are measured.…”

“…The previous studies have sought to tackle the problem of characterising the QoM of fibre reinforced plastics with various methods [13,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] , mainly based on image analysis of microscopy images. Most of these methods were inspired by a large corpus on spatial statistics [12,14,15,30,31] , but the methods implemented for fibre composites often lack the mathematical rigour of the latter.…”