After adding fillers, the shape of the final composite does not change
What do you mean by 80% is it by wt or by volume? If it is by weight then it depends upon the density of the filler and if it is by volume .. then I think it is neither feasible nor useful.
The classic polymer composite materials you are describing would be (i) PDMS/fumed silica or (ii) rubber/carbon black. As Nityanshu notes 80% filler by volume is extremely high and is in fact above geometric packing limits. The resulting composite materials would be extremely crumbly. If you look up for example the composition of tire you could see that it would use only 20-25% filler.
Hashim, this is a very bold step to go beyond the geometric packing limits. You know i liked it. There is a few biological materials with such unusual structure, of course, possess unique properties. Hermit crab's skeleton is made up of layered fibrils which are oriented in multiple direction. High amount of fibrils are connected by very little amount of inorganic components that act as interfacial material between fibrils. Such a structure gives them unique ability to move the tentacles at a very high frequency which is very difficult to mimic in any artificial materials (but there is a few works that mimicked such structures in epoxy based resin). Think about pultrusion, a composite manufacturing technique where 70 to 80% fibers are being used; the rest is wetting materials that basically provides strong interphase between fibers.
Go ahead. Do not live by the books. Break the tradition and you will definitely bring something new.
The thing is the same. Biological Materials or the precise term bio-composites possess unique properties and structure but generally the inorganic part or what you can a filler generally have high density. Pultrusion is one possibility but if the 80% is by volume, I still doubt on the feasibility of the process. It is like gluing the fillers one by one to each other using some matrix.
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