Recycling and Reinforcing of Expanded Polystyrene by Woven Mat and Short E-Glass fibers

Expanded polystyrene (EPS) polymers are widely used in insulation and packaging applications. If their waste hasn’t been managed well and due to their long degradation time, they will cause severe environmental problems for human beings, plants, and animals. Therefore, recycling could be one of the acceptable solutions to overcome such problems in addition to reinforcing them to recover the decay in properties resulting from recycling. In this work two types of EPS have been recycled at different temperatures from 140 to 260°C, and then reinforced by E-glass fibers in mat form and as random short fibers with varied composition from 5 to 25 wt%. The samples have been prepared by homemade thermal press and the tensile properties such as strength, modulus, and ductility have been investigated showing an obvious enhancement of these properties upon an increase in temperature to certain level and with fiber content and length exceeding their critical lengths. Furthermore, interfacial adhesion has been stud-ied by estimating the strength and modulus efficiency factors. The results show that the E- glass fibers could im-prove the strength with more than 300%.