THE USE OF VEGETABLE FILLERS AS REINFORCEMENT MATERIAL IN SBR BASED BIO-COMPOSITES

Abstract

The use of natural fillers as reinforcement material in the production of composite materials has gained extra attention in recent years from the environmental point of view. For this purpose, the use of vegetable fillers as a potential reinforcement material in elastomeric composites was investigated for the production of footwear sole material. In this study the acorn cups and the waste of acorn obtained after the tannin extraction was used as the reinforcement materials for styrene-butadiene rubber based composites. Acorn cups and pulps (acorn wastes) with different ratio (2, 4 and 6 wt%) were compounded with SBR by Banbury and the preparation of the composites with different filler loadings was performed via compression molding. The thermal characteristics of the bio-composites produced for the footwear sole were investigated in terms of Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC), and Thermogravimetric (TGA) analyses. The results revealed that different concentrations of vegetable fillers had no significant effect on DSC results and the highest TGA results were obtained by the use of 2% acorn cups as a reinforcement material. Besides, the homogenous dispersion of vegetable fillers within the elastomer matrix was achieved successfully and the obtained bio-composite materials were found to be a good candidate to be a bio based sole material in footwear production.

Keywords

• Bio-composite
• acom cup
• acom waste
• DSC
• TGA