Ultrahigh Molecular Weight Polyethylene Fiber / Carbon Fiber Hybrid Development Of Lightweight Composite Structures

The poor adhesion of non-polarity ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) fiber with commonly polar resin matrix limits its applications in structure composites. In order to improve adhesion of UHMWPE fiber with matrixs, three methods are explored in this work, which are UHMWPE fiber surface treatment, synthesizing VE resin and introducing carbon fiber to co-hybrid with UHMWPE fiber.The effects of chemical etching to the UHMWPE fiber's surface chemistry and topography have been explored by using chromic acid. The best proportion of K2Cr:O7:H2O:H2SO4 is 10:16:140. The relationship between the treated temperature and the fiber's tensile strength loss show that the best treated temperature is 85℃. Through SEM, FTIR. It has been proved that there are many oxy-organic groups appearing at the surface of treated UHMWPE fiber, including hydroxyl and carboxyl groups. The results of single fiber pull-out show that chemical etching on the surface can improve interface-adhesions between treated fiber and epoxy resin.The high performance VE resin has been obtained by methyl acrylic acid, epoxy E-51 polymerization with suitable proportion. The resin properties are characterized by FTIR, DMA, DTA, TGA, SEM. The research suggests VE has good thermal property, flexural property and impact property, what's more, the adhesion with UHMWPE fiber is also excellent. VE resin can increase adhesion by 25 % in comparison to epoxy E-51.Carbon fiber T300 was chosen as a co-hybrid fiber, and two different kinds UHMWPE fiber/T300 hybrid composites are prepared in both inner-laminar and inter-laminar styles. The inter-laminar hybrid composites exhibited better adhesion than the inner-laminar ones. For the optimized system DC88/T300/VE, the ILSS reached 42.5MPa. 5 times of the untreated DC88/epoxy E-51 system. The density test suggested that the hybrid composite has a potential application. Three ideal hybrid models are proposed to study hybrid mechanisms on the basis of the adhesionproperty analyses by SEM.