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The production of chicken eggs on a widespread industrial level has led to the generation of a large amount of egg shells. These egg shells are considered to be bio-hazardous waste materials although they are a rich source of amino acids and minerals. In the present investigation, effort has been made to incorporate waste poultry egg shell particles (ESP) both in carbonized (C) as well as uncarbonized (UC) form into the matrix of an Aluminum-Silicon (Al-Si) alloy to improve its mechanical properties. Various mechanical properties of the resulting composites such as tensile strength, modulus of elasticity, hardness, toughness, impact and compressive strengths have been determined and found to increase after the addition of the ESPs confirming that the incorporation of waste ESPs in the Al-Si matrix serve as reinforcements. The increase in mechanical properties such as the hardness (10.2% - UC, 19% - C), tensile (6.61% - UC, 10.61% - C), compressive (9.12% - UC, 63.94% - C) and impact strengths (30.07% - UC, 302.35% - C) is more pronounced in the case of carbonized ESPs. Field-Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM) has been conducted to determine the compositions of the matrix materials as well as the composites.

In the present work, a diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA)-based epoxy resin was modified with the help of a liquid rubber (LR) obtained from the pyrolysis of rubber. Tensile tests on samples of rubber modified epoxy resins (REs) containing varying rubber volume fractions (RVF) were conducted to obtain their tensile properties. Fractographic analysis of fractured samples using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) revealed the presence of phase separated rubber zones characterized by microvoids, distributed uniformly in the epoxy domain. Young’s modulus and yield strength of REs were observed to drop with RVF. A three-dimensional (3D) finite element model was employed to predict the elastic properties and stress distributions in REs. Various stress distributions and their dependence on the properties of rubber were examined in detail through the model. The effect of rubber properties on bulk elastic properties of the REs were also studied. Lastly, the effective stress-strain relationship was predicted with the help of an elastic-plastic analysis. Predicted results showed coherence with experimental results.

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