Structure and Properties of PLA Composite Enhanced with Biomass Fillers from Herbaceous Plants
Haining Na, Juncheng Huang, Hongguang Xu, Fei Liu, Liangke Xie, Baoqing Zhu, Jiuchen Wang, Jin Zhu
Abstract
PLA composites containing biomass fillers from the three herbaceous plants such as reed, wheat stalk, and coconut fiber with length and diameter at the scale of several millimeters were prepared without using additives. The reinforcement effect on the properties of PLA/biomass filler composites is investigated. The research results show that the PLA/biomass filler composites exhibit good stiffness, flexural strength, and impact toughness. Among the three kinds of biomass fillers, reed reinforced PLA composites show optimal mechanical properties. When filled with 40%–50% reed, the flexural moduli of the composites are over 7000 MPa. Flexural strength retains at the same level of pure PLA. The notch impact strength reaches to 4.50 ± 0.73 kJ/m2 , which is 2.06 times higher than that of pure PLA. Furthermore, the introduction of biomass fillers increases the crystallization ability of PLA and does not increase the water absorption of the composites. This research demonstrated that PLA composites prepared with biomass fillers from the herbaceous plants (namely herb plastic composites, HPCs) is a material with good comprehensive mechanical properties while retaining the intrinsic particularity of biological sources.