INVESTIGATION OF GLASS FIBER INFLUENCE ON MECHANICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURAL FIBER REINFORCED POLYESTER COMPOSITES: AN EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL APPROACH
Deepak Kumar Mohapatra, Chitta Ranjan Deo, Punyapriya Mishra
Quarterly No. 3, 2022 pages 123-129
DOI:
keywords: glass fiber, kenaf fiber, palmyra palm leaf stalk fiber, mechanical strength, ANSYS
abstract In the past few decades, natural fiber reinforced polymeric composites have gained significant importance for various structural applications in different sectors like the automotive, aerospace, sports and building construction industries. However, hybridizations make the composite more versatile in term of strength, weight and its processing for many engineering applications. In the current study, a polyester resin matrix was reinforced with two different natural fibers, namely kenaf and palmyra palm leaf stalk (PPLS) and hybridized with glass fiber. Four layers of two different fiber mats, kenaf/glass and PPLS/glass with different stacking sequences were employed to fabricated laminates by the hand lay-up technique. In this case, an attempt was made using the numerical approach to investigate the influence of glass fiber on the mechanical characteristics of the laminates. To substantiate the results of the numerical approach, experiments were conducted. Enhancement of both the tensile and flexural strength was observed due to hybridization of both the kenaf and PPLS fiber with glass fiber. The tensile and flexural strength improved by 68.91 and 37.63% respectively when the kenaf fiber was hybridized with glass fiber. Similarly, enhancement of 54.42% of the tensile strength and 15.92% of the flexural strength were noticed when the PPLS fiber was hybridized with glass fiber. Through the use of ANSYS software, finite element analysis (FEA) was employed as a simulation method to examine the tensile and flexural strength. The numerical findings were found to be quite close to the experimental results, with a variation of less than 3%.