Properties of wood plastic composite produced using injection moulding process

The rapidly changing economic and environmental friendly needs of society are causing increasing conversion and efficient use of wood waste resources, producing more wood fine using environmentally friendly processes and technologies, and remaining competitive in the global market place. The competition in high volume markets has focused attention on low priced materials that offer a more favorable strength to weight ratio. Wood plastic composite (WPC) has the lowest material cost has been highly focusing by many industries. However, in current market, WPC is only limited in extrusion processing method where it constrain the WPC processing move into profile extruding such as flooring, decking and column ects. As the WPC processing consume a high technology machineries and high electrical consumption,it cause the WPC process cost is high against low raw material cost. This is the main reason cause the slow down development of WPC industry due to the WPC products selling price is higher than market expected. Due to the above issue, the proposed study on WPC injection moulded method where able to enhance the multi shape wood composite products development to push the WPC products development into new arena of business opporcunity. With injection molded methods, WPC can easily inject and able to mould any wood composite products in any shapes without required any further process such as engraving, shearing, nail, gluing and machining. This will effectively reduce of labor cost and enhance the value of WPC products. With the study, the enhancement of WPC formulation against physical and flexural performance has been studies with different wood fine loading and coupling agent concentration. Test samples have been produced by simple piston injection moulded method with single cavity injection mould to form WPC plate. Those WPC plate has been cut to required specimens size as ASTM standard D1037-99 stated for further testing used. Physical and flexural properties of those WPC test specimens has been analyse and the optimization of wood fine loading and coupling agent concentration has been determined. The result shows the effect of wood fine loading was significently increase the water absorption rating of WPC in injection moulding.65% wood fine loading seem to be the optimum formulation in both physical and flexural performance of WPC. The WPC formulation optimization has been further enhance on studies the effect of different industries grade coupling agent and the concentration to further evaluate the effect to the properties of WPC. Coupling agent of Exxelor PO 1020 with 4% concentration provided better properties performance compare to other coupling agent used. It shows that coupling agent Exxelor PO 1020 given the better linkage effect to matrix fiber-PP in WPC material. It significently perform better in flexural strength as well as in physical performance. The final selection of WPC formulation with 4% Exxelor PO 1020 concentration had been continuing studies the physical and flexural behaviors against injection mould temperature and inject pressure setting with different Wood Fine loading. The mould temperature effect shows significently improved the flow of WPC during injection process. This cause better PP coverage surface with wood fine for this composite material given better resistant to water absorption. The inject pressure effect provided the WPC higher packing pressure during cavity moulding as well as improve the density of the material. Lower pressure cause the short moulding of components and higher pressure causes the biggest backpressure and flushing problem. Both mould temperature and inject pressure shows the factor of improvement of WPC properties in WPC injection moulding processing method. The data obtain from this studies is very useful for most of the industralise injection moulding process for higher viscosity material as wood plastic composite

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