Investigation of the Effect of Waste Materials on the Properties of the Composite Polymer Prosthetics Limbs

Abstract

Nowadays, the trend to benefit from environmentally friendly waste and recycle it instead of incineration processes that can cause pollution in the environment to have a clean and green environment that is free from pollution and can work for a long time without consumption and damage. This study is designed to manufacture prosthetics limbs from PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate) reinforced with different weight percentages of waste paper layers (0%, 3%, 6%, 9%, and 12%) by the “hand lay” method. The tensile, flexural, impact, compression, and hardness of these composites are tested before and after adding weight percentages waste paper layers to determine the mechanical properties behavior. The average values of all the samples are collected and analyzed by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to interpret the results. When discussing the results of mechanical tests, it is found that the addition (12%-waste paper layers) to (PMMA) increased the average values (tensile, flexural, impact, compression, and hardness) by 142.1%, 532.3%, 146%, 99.2%, and 6.37%; respectively, compared to the mean values of other samples. It is clear from this work there is an improvement in the properties of PMMA after strengthening with waste paper layers.