Thermal and erosion wear behaviour of polyester filled with micro-sized LD slag particulates for the development of a sustainable composite

ABSTRACT In the present work, Linz-Donawitz (LD) slag in microparticulate form is used as a filler in polyester resin. The samples are prepared at varied loading between 10 wt. % to 40 wt. %. The properties examined are physical, mechanical, thermal and erosion wear. The findings reveal that the addition of LD slag particulates to the polyester enhances its density. During mechanical characterization, it was observed that tensile and flexural strength improved with increasing LD slag content, but only up to a limited loading. The maximum values obtained are 37.8 MPa and 59.2 MPa, respectively, for an LD slag content of 30 wt. %. Against that, other mechanical properties like tensile and flexural modulus, compressive strength and hardness reached maximum values at 40 wt. % LD slag content. During the measurement of thermal conductivity, it was observed that the inclusion of LD slag improves the value from 0.221 W/m-K for unfilled polymer to 0.453 W/m-K with 40 wt. % filler. Also, the addition of LD slag to the polyester resin improves its thermal stability as the degradation temperature increases along with the char residue. The glass transition temperature and the specific heat increase with filler content and reach a maximum of 85.4 o C and 1.084 kJ/kg-K, respectively. The erosion wear characteristics were explored by executing the experiment prepared as per the L 25 orthogonal array provided by Taguchi’s technique. A model employing an artificial neural network is applied to anticipate the erosion rate at a greater range of parameters.