Experimental Investigation and Response Surface Optimization of Surface Treated Carbon Fiber/Carbon Nanotube Hybrid Reinforced ABS Composites for Lightweight Automotive Components

ABSTRACT Surface treated carbon fiber (CF) and multi‐walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) reinforced acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) composites were designed using fused deposition modeling (FDM) for improved mechanical and thermal properties for lightweight automotive parts. Both MWCNTs and alkaline–silane treatment were used to reinforce CF and create good fiber–matrix adhesion, respectively. These were compared to each other: neat ABS, untreated CF/ABS, treated CF/ABS, MWCNT/ABS and hybrid CF/MWCNT/ABS. The Box–Behnken response surface design was used to explore the effects of CF content, MWCNT content, nozzle temperature and layer thickness. The hybrid composite showed improved interfacial adhesion, lesser amounts of fiber pull out and void formation as well as better stress transfer across multiple scales. The predictive ability of the response models was very good, ranging from 0.963 to 0.982 R 2 . Multi‐response optimization showed that optimum condition is 13.1 wt% CF, 1.12 wt% MWCNT, 243°C nozzle temperature and 0.17 mm layer thickness. The validation of the optimized formulation is carried out with experiment and the result shows that the tensile strength, flexural strength, impact strength, thermal conductivity and void fraction are 67.1, 98.4 MPa, 21.6 kJ m −2 , 0.419 W m −1 K −1 and 2.23% respectively, and the errors are less than 2.3% respectively. The developed hybrid composite is a promising material strategy for the lightweight automotive component fabricated with the FDM technology.