Photovoltaic Industrial Waste as Substitutional Reinforcement in the Preparation of Additively Manufactured Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene Composite

Digital three-dimensional (3D) printing is a popular solid object fabricating technique to print the 3D and complex parts with high accuracy. The present work signifies the effect of reusing the photovoltaic cutting waste such as micron-sized silicon powder with the various weights of (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10) percentage as reinforcement in the making of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) filament using a single-screw extruder. Extruded ABS filaments with various compositions of silicon particles are used for making 3D printed composite parts. The mechanical, tribological, and melt flow index property of the ABS/silicon composites are studied experimentally in this work. The addition of micron-sized silicon particles has reduced the melt flow index value nominally up to 10%, and beyond this, there is a radical reduction in the index value of melt flow. The mechanical characteristics of 3D printed ABS components with 6% silicon particle addition perform much better on the ABS matrix. Mechanical property such as tensile strength of the 6 wt% micron-sized silicon particle-loaded composite exhibits the maximum value of 31.5 MPa, and maximum Shore D hardness of 88 was observed on the 10wt% composite. The wear resistance qualities, such as friction coefficient and rate of specific wear, have improved as the percentage of micron-sized silicon in the ABS matrix has increased. The ABS polymer composite with 10% silicon particle added had the lowest coefficient of friction of 0.184 and the lowest specific wear rate of 1.91(10⁻³mm³ N-m). Fractography of the tensile-tested samples with 6 wt% of micron-sized silicon particle was uniformly distributed in the ABS matrix, and there is a presence of lower order of voids present in the ABS/silicon composite.