Peach pits and PP Composite
Description
The suitability of manufacturing polypropylene based composites filled with peach pits is investigated. Specimens manufactured with 50% peach pits; and 60% peach pits were evaluated and compared with a reference sample manufactured with 60% radiata pine wood and 40% polypropylene. The peach pits composites presented improved physical properties, and higher porosity than radiata pine wood based composites. In addition, the peach pits based composites showed poorer mechanical properties when compared with radiata pine wood composites. This difference increases when adding more peach pits to the composites. The previous performance was attributed to the lower amounts of holocellulose, and higher amounts of lignin and extractives of the pits than radiata pine wood, in addition to the low aspect ratio of the pit particles, which could have affected the results of the mechanical properties, particularly the MOE and MOR.