Experimental Investigation on the Effect of Industrial Waste Iron Filler to Improve Thermo-mechanical Properties in Vinyl Ester Polymer Composites

This work investigates the effect of iron filler to improve thermo-mechanical properties in vinyl ester polymer composites. The iron filler with 50 µm was extracted from the industrial iron waste by using ball milling machine. Different wt% of iron fillers such as 5, 10 and 15 were considered to fabricate the vinyl ester polymer composite samples. Tensile, flexural and shore-D hardness tests were conducted to evaluate the mechanical properties as per ASTM standard D638, D792 and D2240, respectively. In addition, the thermal conductivity was studied using Lee’s Disc Method as per ASTM standard C 177. The chemical elements of pure vinyl ester and filler loaded samples were performed by energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis. The result reveals that the tensile and flexural strengths have been improved by 10.93% and 57.1% for 5 wt% filler loaded samples, respectively, as compared with pure vinyl ester composite samples. Moreover, the hardness of 5 wt% filler loaded samples is increased to 74 shore-D. The uniform dispersion of fillers was studied by field emission scanning electron microscopic (FESEM) images. This study concludes that the iron filler loaded polymer composites can be used for the thermal energy storage system.