INTRODUCTIONPolyethylene (PE) is one of the most widely used thermoplastic in the world because of its good properties such as toughness, near moisture absorption, excellent chemical inertness, low coefficient of friction and ease of processing (Khanam and Al Maadeed, 2015).The precise degree of crystallinity density are dependent on the molecular weight of PE (Usman et al., 2016). Generally, the most used PE grades are low density polyethylene (LDPE), medium density polyethylene (MDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE). HDPE in particular exhib performances such as chemical stability barrier, mechanical strength, and dielectric properties (Musa et al., 2017), and is the third most frequently used plastic in the world (Kumar et al., 2011). These properties makes HDPE a versatile material in agriculture, automotive, machine packaging and daily sundries (Dusunceli and Colak, 2008) manufacture of many other products such as milk jugs, detergent bottles, margarine tubs, garbage containers (Klyosov, 2007); water pipes (Vasile and Pascu, 2005) and bottle caps resulting in a large volume of wastes. Above all, HDPE has a strong plasticity and deformability (Pawlak and Galesky, 2005),
ABSTRACT In the quest to clean up the environment and produce economically viable materials from plastic wastes and readily available natural fibres, groundnut shell powder reinforced recycled high density polyethylene composite was prepared via two roll melt mixin compression moulding technique. The dynamic mechanical properties of the composites such as storage modulus (E'), loss modulus (E''), and damping parameter (Tan investigated using 242E dynamic mechanical analyzer in a temperature range from 3 100 0 C at a frequency of 1 Hz. It was found that the storage modulus of all the composites decrease with increase in temperature with composite containing 25%wt fibre having maximum E' value of 1158.47MPa compared to 1033.58MPa of the unreinforced recycled high density polyethylene. These results indicated that the thermal stability and load bearing capacity of the recycled high density polyethylene have been improved with the incorporation of groundnut shell powder. Scanning Electron micrographs showed better interfacial adhesion between treated groundnut shell powder in the polymer matrix; this explained the observed improvement in the viscoelastic properties of the composites.