Effect of wood flour and nano-SiO2 on stimulus response, mechanical, and thermal behavior of 3D printed polylactic acid composites

The present study focuses on development and characterization of nano-SiO2 reinforced wood flour reinforced polylactic acid (PLA) composite. The detail characterization involves the physical characterization such as stimulus response behavior, mechanical characterization such as hardness, tensile strength, flexural strength, impact strength, and so forth, and thermal characterization such as thermal stability and thermal conductivity. The finding of results indicates that the shape memory recovery rate and recovery ratio are increased with the increase in temperature. On adding 2 wt% of nano-SiO2, micro-hardness, flexural strength, impact strength are increased by 35%, 25.4%, 32.6% respectively. Whereas, on adding 5 wt% of wood flour, micro-hardness, flexural strength are increased by 17%, 4.4%, 15% respectively. On the other hand, tensile strength is decreased with the addition of wood flour and nano-SiO2. In addition, increase in wood flour increases the shape recovery rate whereas increase in nano-SiO2 decreases the shape recovery rate. In thermal analysis, increase in wood flour and nano-SiO2 content improves the thermal degradation temperature. On the other hand, addition of wood flour and nano-SiO2 decreases the thermal conductivity of PLA composite.