Optimisation of Injection Moulded Polypropylene Sawdust Composite Using Response Surface Methodology and Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

This study focuses on the optimisation of the injection moulded Polypropylene-Sawdust composite. The Polypropylene material and sawdust were mixed together to form a homogenous mixture with various percentage composition by volume as recommended by the design of experiments using the central composite design (CCD). The two screw plunger injection moulding machine was used to produce Polypropylene-Sawdust composite at various temperature. The produced composite was evaluated for its mechanical properties which included tensile strength, proof stress, percentage elongation and flexural strength. The response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) were used to determine the effect of the interaction of temperature, material type and percentage by volume of material on the mechanical properties of the produced Polypropylene-sawdust composite. The models were validated using coefficient of determination (R 2), the coefficient of determination (R 2) obtained ranged from 0.9435 (94.357%) to 0.9988 (99.88%) which indicates that a substantial good fit was achieved by the developed models. A desirability of 0.952 was obtained which shows the adequacy of the model terms the optimization results for Polypropylene-Sawdust composite shows that the tensile strength, proof stress, flexural strength and flexural modulus were maximized with a values of 31.90 MPa, 41.94 MPa, 88.22 MPa and 2.72 GPa respectively which was obtained at barrel temperature of 224.65 o C. Percentage elongation and average deflection were minimized with a values of 74.12% and 6.46 cm respectively. The artificial neural networks gave the optimal of the two examined models.

A critical review on mechanical and morphological characteristics of injection molded biodegradable composites

“…The researchers concluded that flexural modulus of the long fiber reinforced composite was more when compared one-on-one with the short fiber reinforced composite counterpart. Aliyegbenoma and Ozakpolor [118] investigated the conjoint influence of temperature, volume of material, and nature of polymer material on mechanical properties of the PP-sawdust composite using the technique of RSM. The maximum flexural strength of the composite was 88.22 MPa and the maximum flexural modulus was 2.72 GPa at a barrel temperature of 224.65 C. Clemons and Ibach [119] carefully examined the influence of fungi on mechanical properties of HDPE containing wood fibers and molded by the technique of injection molding.…”