A method for estimating the fibre length in fibre-PLA composites.

Wood pulp fibres are an important component of environmentally sound and renewable fibre-reinforced composite materials. The high aspect ratio of pulp fibres is an essential property with respect to the mechanical properties a given composite material can achieve. The length of pulp fibres is affected by composite processing operations. This thus emphasizes the importance of assessing the pulp fibre length and how this may be affected by a given process for manufacturing composites. In this work a new method for measuring the length distribution of fibres and fibre fragments has been developed. The method is based on; (i) dissolving the composites, (ii) preparing the fibres for image acquisition and (iii) image analysis of the resulting fibre structures. The image analysis part is relatively simple to implement and is based on images acquired with a desktop scanner and a new ImageJ plugin. The quantification of fibre length has demonstrated the fibre shortening effect because of an extrusion process and subsequent injection moulding. Fibres with original lengths of >1 mm where shortened to fibre fragments with length of <200 µm. The shortening seems to be affected by the number of times the fibres have passed through the extruder, the amount of chain extender and the fraction of fibres in the polymer matrix.

Computer-assisted scanning electron microscopy of wood pulp fibres: dimensions and spatial distributions in a polypropylene composite.

A shape description approach is introduced as a step for performing an automatic processing of fibre cross-sectional images. The approach, in combination with appropriate mathematical morphology, yields edited images, which are suitable for further computerized image analysis. Important parameters such as fibre wall thickness, fibre perimeter, form factor and collapse index are quantified effectively and objectively. Although some differences are encountered within groups of split fibres, manual and automatic quantification of intact fibres yields similar results. In addition, the suitability of a distance transform approach for quantifying the fibre inter-distances in composites is demonstrated. Such tools will be valuable for understanding the mechanical properties of engineered fibre-reinforced composite materials.