Temperature dependence of the interfacial shear strength in glass reinforced polypropylene and epoxy composites

We have recently reported the development of a method which allows the measurement of IFSS over a wide temperature range [6,7]. In this paper we present data obtained using the microbond test in the temperature controlled environment of a thermo-mechanical analyser (TMA). IFSS in glass fibre–polypropylene and glass fibre-epoxy systems in the temperature range -40°C to 150°C are presented and discussed

Effect of Silane coupling agent on mechanical performance of glass fibre

Mechanical performance of commercially manufactured unsized and γ-APS sized boron-free E-glass fibres has been characterised using single fibre tensile test. Both apparent fibre modulus and fibre strength were found to strongly depend on fibre gauge length. The average strength of sized fibres was found 40%-80% higher than unsized fibres at different gauge lengths. Weibull analysis suggested that the failure mode of unsized fibres could be described by unimodal Weibull distribution, whereas the strength distribution of sized fibres appeared to be controlled by two exclusive types of flaw population, type A and B. Comparison of the Weibull plots between unsized and sized fibres revealed that the strength of unsized fibres was likely to be dominated by type A flaws existing on the bare glass surface and type B flaws may be related to the defects on the glass surface coated with silane. This was partially supported by the observation of fractured cross-sectional area using SEM. It was, therefore, proposed that the strength difference between unsized and sized glass fibres may be more reasonably interpreted from the surface protection standpoint as opposed to the flaw healing effect. The results obtained from this work showed that silane coupling agent plays a critical role in the strength retention of commercially manufactured E-glass fibres and the silane effect on the fibre strength is also affected by the change in gauge length of the sample

The role of residual thermal stress in interfacial strength of polymer composites by a novel single fibre technique

The temperature dependence of the interfacial properties of glass fibre reinforced polypropylene and epoxy composites was investigated using a novel microbond test in the temperature controlled environment of a thermo-mechanical analyser. Highly significant inverse dependence of IFSS on testing temperature was observed in both systems. The temperature dependence of the GF-PP IFSS was accounted for by the variation of residual radial compressive stresses at the interface with the test temperature. On the other hand, it was found that the residual thermal stress did not seem to fully account for the temperature dependence of IFSS in GF-Epoxy. Nevertheless, the results clearly showed that GF-Epoxy IFSS had a strong correlation with the modulus of the epoxy matrix

Chromo-Rayleigh Interactions of Dark Matter

For a wide range of models, dark matter can interact with QCD gluons via chromo-Rayleigh interactions. We point out that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as a gluon machine, provides a superb probe of such interactions. In this paper, we introduce simplified models to UV-complete two effective dark matter chromo-Rayleigh interactions and identify the corresponding collider signatures, including four jets or a pair of di-jet resonances plus missing transverse energy. After performing collider studies for both the 8 TeV and 14 TeV LHC, we find that the LHC can be more sensitive to dark matter chromo-Rayleigh interactions than direct detection experiments and thus provides the best opportunity for future discovery of this class of models.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure

Development and application of micromechanical techniques for characterising interfacial shear strength in fibre-thermoplastic composites

The development of single fibre pull-out and microbond tests for characterising interfacial strength in thermoplastic composites is reviewed in detail. Manufacture of an experimental jig and sample preparation regimes for both tests are described. The challenges addressed in the sample preparation include the measurement of embedded fibre length for pull-out samples and the low yield rate of axisymmetric resin droplets obtained during sample preparation under nitrogen. The applications of these laboratory developed techniques are demonstrated by characterisation of the interfacial shear strength (IFSS) of glass fibre-polypropylene (GF-PP) and natural fibre-polylactic acid (NF-PLA). The comparison of the IFSS between neat and modified GF-PP showed that both methods were sensitive to the interfacial performance change despite the poor agreement between them for the absolute IFSS values from the same composite. The effect of the material modification was also reflected in load-displacement curves with different behaviour of the frictional motion after complete debonding. When a high level of fibre-matrix adhesion was realised in the composites with weak fibres, the microbond test showed higher feasibility for characterising the IFSS. This was clearly shown in its application to NF-PLA

Consensus with Max Registers

We consider the problem of implementing randomized wait-free consensus from max registers under the assumption of an oblivious adversary. We show that max registers solve m-valued consensus for arbitrary m in expected O(log^* n) steps per process, beating the Omega(log m/log log m) lower bound for ordinary registers when m is large and the best previously known O(log log n) upper bound when m is small. A simple max-register implementation based on double-collect snapshots translates this result into an O(n log n) expected step implementation of m-valued consensus from n single-writer registers, improving on the best previously-known bound of O(n log^2 n) for single-writer registers