PSI - Issue 80

Stanislav Buklovskyi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 80 (2026) 146–156 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

148

3

2. Manufacturing and characterization of composite 2.1. Manufacturing of CB/UHMWPE composites

CB/UHMWPE composites investigated in this paper were produced using two manufacturing techniques: compression molding (CM) and equal channel angular extrusion (ECAE). The CM process is a widely adopted method for fabricating high-strength polymer materials (Park & Lee, 2012). ECAE, originally introduced for metals by Segal (1999) to refine their granular microstructure, has recently been applied to polymers and polymer-based composites demonstrating potential to improve their properties (Cook et al., 2019; Miroshnichenko et al., 2023; Reinitz et al., 2016). For both CM and ECAE processing methods, the same experimental setup shown in Fig.1 was used. The setup features steel dies with a square cross-section of 5 cm × 5 cm and channel lengths of 16.5 cm in both vertical and horizontal directions. For CM, only the horizontal part of the setup was used. UHMWPE GUR 1050 powder (Celanese Corporation, Irving, TX) was mechanically mixed with conductive CB particles (Asbury Carbon, Asbury, NJ) for 25 minutes in the acoustic mixer. The resulting mixture was then placed between the dies and either compression molded at 175 °C for 2.5 hours or compressed and then extruded at elevated temperature through the channel at a rate of 0.2 – 0.25 mm/s. After fabrication, all samples were cooled at room temperature for 24 hours. A detailed description of processing steps is provided in Buklovskiy et al. (2024) and Solberg (2024).

Fig. 1: A schematic of the fabrication setup for both CM and ECAE.

Although minor differences in CB agglomeration were observed between CM and ECAE samples, they were not significant (Miroshnichenko et al., 2023) and the averaged microstructural data across both methods was used for modeling purposes in this paper.

2.2. Characterization studies utilizing μCT Characterization of CB/UHMWPE microstructure was performed utilizing μCT ZEISS Xradia 610 Versa microscope. The details on the microscope settings are provided in Buklovskiy et al. ( 2024). μCT image datasets were processed using ORS Dragonfly software (Dragonfly 2022.2, Comet Technologies Canada Inc.). An example of both unprocessed three-dimensional and processed two-dimensional scans for 2.5 wt% of CB/UHMWPE are shown in Fig. 2. Dark grey (black) color corresponds to UHMWPE granules; white layers around granules are associated with high concentration of carbon inclusions.