Physical and Mechanical Properties of Empty Fruit Bunch Fibre-Cement Bonded Fibreboard for Sustainable Retrofit Building

Cement bonded fibreboards have been extensively used mainly in the construction of buildings in numerous countries. Most commonly used materials to fabricate the cement boards are wood. Therefore, due to the depletion of wood resources, the potential of Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch Fibre (OPEFB) as wood replacement for cement boards production is explored in this study as one of the materials for sustainable retrofit building. The main obstacle for Empty Fruit Bunch (EFB) fibre cement composite manufacturing is the chemical incompatibility between fibre and cement, which inhibits cement setting and hardening. In this study, EFB fibre was then treated with 0.4%, 1% and 4% of NaOH for EFB-CB fabrication and chemical accelerator which is calcium chloride (CaCl2) was used at 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.3% and 4% based on cement weight. Physical and mechanical properties were observed in this study. The result indicated that the best percentage of NaOH is 1% as pre-treatment for the fibres, meanwhile minimum percentage of 0.3% and 0.4% CaCl2 should be consider as cement accelerator in board production. Other than that, the minimum requirements for physical and mechanical properties were met by EFB fibre treated with 4% NaOH with or without cement accelerators.