Abstract:
Abstract: This research presents a partial biodegradable polymeric blend aimed at large-scale fused
deposition modeling (FDM). The literature reports partial biodegradable blends with high contents
of fossil-fuel-based polymers (>20%) that make them unfriendly to the ecosystem. Furthermore, the
reported polymer systems neither present good mechanical strength nor have been investigated in
vulnerable environments that result in biodegradation. This research, as a continuity of previous
work, presents the stability against biodegradability of a partial biodegradable blend prepared
with polylactic acid (PLA) and polypropylene (PP). The blend is designed with intended excess
physical interlocking and sufficient chemical grafting, which has only been investigated for thermal
and hydrolytic degradation before by the same authors. The research presents, for the first time,
ANOVA analysis for the statistical evaluation of endurance against biodegradability. The statistical
results are complemented with thermochemical and visual analysis. Fourier transform infrared
spectroscopy (FTIR) determines the signs of intermolecular interactions that are further confirmed
by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The thermochemical interactions observed in FTIR and
DSC is validated with thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is
also used as a visual technique to affirm the physical interlocking. It is concluded that the blend
exhibits high stability against soil biodegradation in terms of high mechanical strength and the high mass
retention percentage