Fiber breakage phenomena in long fiber reinforced plastic preparation

Due to the high demand of smart green, the lightweight technologies have become the driving force for the development of automotives and other industries in recent years. Among those technologies, using short and long fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) to replace some metal components can reduce the weight of an automotive significantly. However, the microstructures of fibers inside plastic matrix are too complicated to manage and control during the injection molding through the screw, the runner, the gate, and then into the cavity. This study focuses on the fiber breakage phenomena during the screw plastification. Results show that fiber breakage is strongly dependent on screw design and operation. When the screw geometry changes, the fiber breakage could be larger even with lower compression ratio.