Preparation And Characterization Of Composites Based On Recycled PolyEthylene And PolyEthylene Terephtalate Bleneds

Polymers affect every day of our life. These materials have so many varied characteristics and applications that their usefulness can only be measured by our imagination. Polymers have been with us since the beginning of time, they are the materials of past, present, and future generations. This wide spread of polymers in our life leads to the existence of huge amounts of them  as a waste specially Polyethylene Terephtalate (PET) and  polyethylene (PE) which considered  as the most  widely consumed types of polymer in world  plastics with production in the billions of pounds each year.

Utilization of this waste has become very important problem and  must be solved   safely, environmentally and economically ,this can be  obtained by recycling  which represents a valid alternative to the disposal of post consumer PET and PE . As known  every polymer has very distinct characteristics and they different in some properties and application    this can  applied on both PE and PET;  for example PET is brittle , semi crystalline  and  has high modulus …etc , while PE is ductile  and low modules .  As known there are  a big gap in properties both PE and PET and there are more than one type of PE ,  high density polyethylene (HDPE) will be the coordinate polymer for this purpose .

The issue of this  project is producing   a new product as composite material  from recycled polyethylene (PE) and  recycled polyethylene  terephalate (PET)  blend with unique properties by different methods as extrusion and hot process with different forms of PET  (powder ,fiber, flake’s )  with different temperatures and percentages  leading to strengthening PE with PET .

Mechanical properties such as modulus and Tensile strength were tested  for the new composite. The best combination is powder 15% at 200C (Ts =24.075MPa , E=648.93MPa) , powder 10% at 180C (Ts =29.31MPa , E=854.33 MPa) . Where version HDPE has mechanical properties of (Ts = 15.58 MPa) & (           E=396.37 MPa)  and version PET has mechanical properties of (Ts=51.98 MPa) & (E=901.09 MPa).