Abstract:
Polymers are used in various industrial applications due to their ease of production,
light weight, and ductility. Fillers such as clays are added to polymers to
improve a range of factors such as material processing, thermal properties, fire
retardance and cost. However, adding clays may negatively impact the mechanical
performance of the composite. In addition, manufacturing parameters, for
example, number of extrusions, press time, and so forth may also have an influence
on the resulting composite system. This study performs a statistical analysis
on a set of previously obtained experimental results, which investigated the
influence of various manufacturing, material, and testing parameters on the
composite mechanical properties. Exploratory data and statistical analysis techniques
are applied to the historical tensile test data to gain insight into the influence
on mechanical properties as well as the relationships and interactions
between the parameters. Specifically, it is shown that clay loading does not have
a statistically significant effect on the composite mechanical properties, which is
contrary to literature. Another surprising result is the poor performance of the
clay that is compatible with high-density polyethylene compared to the clay that
is compatible with poly vinyl chloride. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate
the usefulness of applying statistical analysis on a large volume of data
to understand the diverse correlations between the different variables.
