Recycling of Broken Waste Glass as Polyethylene Nanofiller for Electrical Insulating System

Abstract

This work focuses on the preparation of a high-quality glass powder from the broken windowpane. The expected glass powder must show a high amount of silicon dioxide with fine particle size. The processing technique used in this work is coarse grinding and high-speed vibratory milling under a variety of conditions to get the best quality of glass powder. The particle size and particle size distribution were examined by using DLS technique. The chemical composition was examined by EDX together with FT-IR and XRF spectroscopies. The results showed that the wide range of particle size distribution occurred in all milling conditions, which approximately ranged from 0.3 to 7 µm, and the 270 min-milling time showed the smallest particle size of glass powder. The chemical analysis showed that the glass powder is rich in silica which contained about 70.47% of SiO2. After that, the various ratios of the glass powder/HDPE composites were formed by using the traditional casting method. The physical and electrical properties were investigated for all composites. The results showed that after adding glass powder into the HDPE matrix, the εr value significantly drops due to the inorganic filler suppressed polarization within the systems. For the resistivity, the ρ value significantly increases after adding glass powder to the HDPE matrix for all compositions because this filler promotes the hinder of electric current flow. Finally, it can conclude that the waste glass powder can use as a filler in the HDPE-based composite as better as the commercial SiO2 powder for the electrical insulting application.