New composites using HDPE polymer obtained from SABIC with asphaltene has been developed.Asphaltene is a solid undesirable material found in crude oils. Asphaltene is known to lower quality of petroleum products, clog well formations and flow lines, and is a concern for refiners. The oil and gas industry has expressed a need for technologies to increase the value and provide a more environmentally friendly end application for asphaltene byproducts. Asphaltene have a higher C/H ratio and possesses fused aromatic rings bearing long chain aliphatic hydrocarbons. On other hand, there is a need for reinforcement / filler for polymer composites to achieve good combination of mechanical strength, viscoelastic properties and thermal stability in addition to cost reduction and improved processing characteristics. The asphaltene as fillers is being evaluated in this work for most commonly used thermoplastic, HDPE. Five compositions of HDPE-asphaltene composites were prepared using 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10 and 15% of asphaltene. Several composites of high density polyethylene with different amounts of asphaltenes were prepared by the melt-mixing technique. From the analysis of their properties, it was found that the presence of asphaltenes does not alter the chemical characteristics as it comes from FTIR measurements showing exactly the same peaks. Furthermore, the addition of asphaltenes increased the thermal stability of HDPE as it comes from TGA measurements. However, only for the 2.5%wt it seems that the thermal stability of the HDPE is deteriorated. From the investigation of the mechanical tensile properties, it was found that the addition of asphaltenes could improve tensile strength, elongation, elastic modulus and the yield stress with the increment of the %wt. Overall, from this study it seems that the optimum amount of asphaltenes that could be added in the HDPE is around 5%wt. resulting in the best enhanced thermal stability, +7% against neat HDPE, accompanied with the highest improved mechanical tensile properties, +3.7% better tensile strength, +15.5% better Young’s modulus and +7.9% better yield stress in comparison with the neat HDPE.

Studying filler effects of asphaltene in high density polyethylene (HDPE)

254th National Meeting (2017)

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