Development of polyamide 6 based single polymer composites reinforced by novel stitched plain fabrics

Abstract In the present study, novel woven reinforced single polymer composites (WSPC) based on polyamide 6 (PA6) is developed via a combination of powder-coating of PA6 textile reinforcements with PA6 empty microcapsules (EMC) and compression molding techniques. Activated anionic ring-opening polymerization of e-caprolactam was employed to synthesize the PA6-EMC which was transformed during the compression molding into WSPC matrix without damaging the PA6 textile reinforcements. A promising novel class of PA6 woven fabrics, stitched plain, which are patented by Jakob Muller company AG® were used as reinforcements. The tensile properties of stitched plain reinforced WSPC were studied and compared to ones reinforced by the plain-woven structure and the PA6 neat matrix reference materials. The parametric studies are performed on the stress field along the elements of reinforcements, using image processing to correlate the influence of reinforcement architectures with the failure mechanism of WSPC.