Study on the Compressive Modulus of Nylon-11/Silica Nanocomposites

Abstract

This paper investigates the unusual characteristics regarding the mechanical properties of Nylon-11 filled with different volume fractions of silica nanoparticles by selective laser sintering (SLS) from numerical simulation. The compressive modulus was predicted by two different numerical models and compared with the experimentally measured one. While the two-phase model has a limited capability in explaining the unusual behavior shown in the compressive modulus obtained by experiments with 2% volume fraction of nanoparticles, the effective interface model can simulate the unexpected characteristic of nanocomposites according to the volume fraction of nanoparticles. We can conclude that the effective interface model should be employed to predict the mechanical properties of nanocomposites for efficiency and accuracy.