Mechanical behavior and failure analysis of recycled polymers by use of miniature punch specimens

In today's society, recycling is a priority, and using recycled materials to obtain new 100% reusable materials is an important aspect of some manufacturing sectors. Clearly, the mechanical properties of these new materials can vary considerably from the original material, so it is necessary to carry out a complete mechanical characterization to know its behavior for both standard specimens and final components. One of the common drawbacks is the inability to extract standard size specimens from a final component with a reduced size. In this paper, the use of the small punch test is proposed as a means of solving this problem. At present, this test is used for estimating mechanical properties in those cases when there is not a sufficient amount of material to perform standard tests. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the feasibility of using miniature punch specimens for the mechanical characterization of recycled polymers. The results are compared with those obtained from standard uniaxial tensile specimens, and a corresponding correlation between the two tests is established. (C) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.