Evaluation of Mechanical Properties of Bamboo Sisal Fibers Reinforced Unsaturated Polyester Hybrid Composites

Abstract

Natural fibre composites have become a popular new material because of their low raw material cost, easy availability, better strength, stiffness, and recyclability, renewable with environmental friendliness. Natural fibre composites are likely to be environmentally superior to glass fibre composites in most cases and natural fibre production has lower environmental impacts compared to glass fibre production. The tensile, flexural, impact and water absorption are the important properties of the natural fibres. This investigation is focused on Bamboo/Sisal reinforced unsaturated polyester hybrid composite. The objective of this research work is to study the mechanical and water absorption behavior of sisal fiber reinforced polyester composites and to estimate the condition that enables optimum mechanical and water absorption characteristics and to find out the effect of hybridization of bamboo fiber reinforcement with untreated and NaOH treated conditions. Initially, the tensile, flexural, impact properties and water absorption characteristics are estimated for sisal/unsaturated polyester composite material and optimum fibre length and weight percentage are determined. To improve the tensile, flexural, impact properties, sisal fiber is hybridized with bamboo fiber. This research work shows that addition of bamboo fibre in sisal/ unsaturated polyester composites of up to 50% by weight results in increased mechanical properties with low water absorption property. Further, Morphological analysis is applied to observe fracture behavior and fibre pull-out of the samples using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). newline