Determination of critical properties of orange peel for a polymer reinforcement material

Accurately determining the critical properties of orange peels ensures composite engineers can successfully monitor and control in-service composite failures. However, the current approaches to property determination are deficient, lack critical analysis, and are not wide-ranging. Thus, they fail to accurately establish the important properties of orange peels. To overcome this challenge, this article establishes the compressive strength, heat absorption, and electrical conductivity of an orange peel polymer to understand the behaviour of the material in lightweight composite applications. Three experimental sets were used to determine the three mentioned properties. The results obtained showed that the average heat energy absorbed by the samples of collected orange peels in 28 poly bags was 79.32 J. The highest and lowest heat absorbed by the samples was found to be 162.03 and 11.08 J, respectively. The average electrical conductivity was measured at 0.025σwhile the average resistance, length, and surface area of 20 orange peel samples were found to be 27.24Ω, 2.92 cm, and 7.02 cm2, respectively. The resistance of the orange peels had the greatest influence on their electrical conductivity. Lastly, the compressive shear strengths of the 0.300, 0.425, and 0.600-mm orange peel particulates were found to be 41.86, 14.82, and 9.58 kN/m2, respectively. With this information, composite design engineers using orange peel reinforcements could improve their design accuracies and extend in-service composite lives.