Preparation of single polymer composites

There are various techniques for the preparation of SPCs, some of which are outlined below. 

Another technique is the overheating method whereby highly oriented, crystalline polymer fibers are constrained and heated. Since the polymer chain must relax to reach the isotropic liquid state, preventing this relaxation is associated with an increase in of around 10 °C [5], widening the processing window. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to constrain the polymer chains effectively if the molecular chains are folded, or the chain mobility is high. 

The film stacking method is a technique where the fiber reinforcement is sandwiched between films of the same polymer, and then hot pressing is apphed to consolidate them together. Note that the melting of the matrix-giving film should start at lower temperature than the reinforcement. This technique has been apphed to a wide range of polymers, such as poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET) [6-7], polypropylene (PP) [8-11], polyethylene (PE) [10,12] and polylactic acid (PLA) [13]. 

Co-extrusion is another technique to produce SPCs. The outer layer of the co-extruded and drawn tapes has a lower melting temperature than the core. The desired objects are prepared from various assemblies of the co-extruded tapes (woven, laminates of different lay-ups) by hot pressing methods. The majority of the research has focused on a combination of a PP homopolymer for the core of the tape, and PP copolymer as the skin. After 

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