Investigation of mechanical properties of bamboo/sisal fiber reinforced hybrid composite materials

Abstract

Sisal and Bamboo fibers are the most common fibers extracted from natural plants used to fabricate the bio-composite, environmentally friendly products. In this work, the Bamboo-Sisal fibers reinforced epoxy hybrid composite is fabricated to investigate and analyze the compression and hardness properties. The fibers were extracted mechanically and manually from bamboo and sisal plants. The 5% and 8% concentration of sodium hydroxide have been used to treat bamboo and sisal fibers respectively to eliminate lignin, cellulose, and other dirty particles in order to increase interfacial bonding of epoxy to fibers, and performance of the composite. Taguchi experimental approach is used to design composite by considering basic parameters such as weight fraction of sisal, fibers orientation, and curing temperature which affect composite performance. Compression molding and hand lay-up techniques have been used to fabricate the composite. The compression and hardness tests ware predicted on the specimen of hybrid bamboo/sisal fiber reinforced epoxy composites prepared with ASTM standard. The analyzed result revealed that the composite contains a 20/15% volume fraction of sisal to bamboo fibers and fabricated with fiber plies orientation of [0 S /0 B /0 S /0 B /0 S /0 B ] and curing temperature at 40ºC record a high compression strength. While the better hardness strength obtained from composite contain 15/20% volume fraction of sisal to bamboo fibers, and fabricated with fiber plies orientation of [0 S /0 B /0 S /0 B /0 S /0 B ] and cured at 55ºC. as matrix fabricated by hand layup and compression