The characteristic of unsaturated polyester resin wettability toward glass fiber orientation, density and surface treatment

Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia, Depok 16424, Indonesia

Abstract

Wettability of composite is one of key to increase mechanical properties of composite that affected by structure of reinforcement and type of resin used. Therefore, this research focused on the effect of orientation, density and surface treatment on fiber to the characteristic of composite’s wettability, which is observed by contact angle and wetting time. The fiber used in this research is fiberglass, and the method for contact angle measurement is direct observation from the camera recorder and the data record will be processed and analyzed by using image processing method. The result for those variations can be obtained from the relation of variations toward contact angle and wetting time. According to result of research, fiber with orientation 45°/45° gives lower contact angle but longer wetting time than fiber with orientation 0°/90°. For orientation 45°/45°, the differences in wetting time is 15 second longer than orientation 0°/90°. In case of fiber density, the sheet with fiber density of 900 has 7 second faster for wetting time than sheet with fiber density of 1250. The surface treatment with NaOH 5% can accelerate the wetting time until 10 second.