ABSTRACT
Used polymeric materials are often burned or end up in landfills. Those methods represent serious pollution of the environment. The safe option is to recycle the used polymers as filling materials in epoxy flooring tiles.
The aim of this work is to study the friction and wear of epoxy flooring materials filled by recycled thermoplastic polymers sliding against rubber. It is well known that thermosetting materials such as epoxy are suffering from the inherent brittleness and relatively high wear rate while thermoplastics have favorable tribological characteristics. To enable epoxy resin to cope the more severe applications, it is proposed to use thermoplastic powders as filling material.
Experiments were carried out using test rig to measure the friction coefficient displayed by the sliding of the tested epoxy composites filled by recycled thermoplastic powders. Experimental results showed that filling epoxy matrix by thermoplastic polymers can enhance both friction coefficient and wear of the tested composites to be considered as promising flooring materials. Those epoxy composites are 20 wt. % high density polyethylene, 50 wt. % polyamide, (10 – 30) wt. % polypropylene, 10 wt. % polytetrafluoroethylene, 50 wt. % polyvinyl chloride and (10 – 20) wt. % polystyrene. Filling epoxy composites by polymethyl methacrylate caused significant wear increase so that the possibility of using these composites as flooring materials is limited, although those composites have an increasing trend of friction with increasing polymethyl methacrylate content. Besides, composites filled by PMMA have relatively low electric static charge generated from the friction against rubber.