The study on the Effect of Reinforcing Fillers Characteristics on Mechanical Properties of Rubber / Polymer Composites

The use of large quantities of reinforcing fillers such as carbon black and silica in rubber vulcanizates has led to the attainment of specific mechanical properties of the rubber. The reinforcement anticipation of rubbers is limited to models of elastic or viscous behaviour of polymer composites or rubber. However, except volume fraction of the filler, many features of the fillers are effective on dynamical-mechanical behaviour of these composites. The main focus of this paper, is the influence of filler characteristics, such as the filler surface chemistry, the filler shape, the filler structure, particle size of the filler, and specially size distribution of the filler particles in reinforcement of colloidal, polymeric and rubber systems.Among the factors mentioned, the effect of particle size distribution of the filler in rubber systems is further considered.