TY - THES ID - 136313845 TI - Interfacial adhesion in Aramid reinforced thermoplastic composites: Determination of work of adhesion at high temperatures AU - Gorter, Daan AU - Fuentes Rojas, Carlos AU - Van Vuure, Aart Willem AU - Pfeiffer, Helge AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Industriële Ingenieurswetenschappen. Opleiding Master in de industriële wetenschappen. Chemie (Leuven) PY - 2019 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Industriële Ingenieurswetenschappen DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136313845 AB - In a world where efficiency and therefore weight reduction are becoming more important, composite materials can offer a solution. Fibre reinforced composites are materials that consist of at least two different materials, one fibre phase and a matrix phase. Besides studying the properties of these individual materials it is important to study how those materials interact with each other. This thesis starts with determining the compatibility of different fibre matrix combinations at room temperature. A frequently used method to study the compatibility is based on the surface energy components. These are determined by contact angle measurements of fibres and polymer films with different test liquids at room temperature. One important parameter to judge the compatibility is the work of adhesion. At room temperature this one is calculated based on the acid-base theory. The second part of this thesis tried to develop a new method to determine the work of adhesion of a system. Instead of calculating the work of adhesion at room temperature this method aimed to determine it at high temperature. This method was based on determining the contact angle between one fibre and a droplet. It was easier to accurately measure the inflection angle of the droplet then measure the contact angle directly. Therefore this method measured the inflection angle at high temperature. This method delivered some unexpected results. Even in an inert environment the droplet volume of polypropylene droplet was decreasing. This influenced the contact angle measurements. When the volume decreased the contact angle measured was the receding contact angle and not the advancing since the embedded length was decreasing. To finalise this thesis tried to measure the interfacial shear strength(IFSS) using a microdroplet pull out test equipped with acoustic emission. Even though the setup was similar to previous research using this technique this method didn’t have useable results. The IFSS was calculate using the shear-lag model as well as the ‘alternative’ Zhandarov model. The results from the Zhandarov model suggest that the interphase already had some failure before testing since they were not constant for larger embedded lengths. ER -