• Adagimath, Mrutyunjay
• Mathad, Manoj
• Khan, Anish
• Patil, Arun
• Kohli, Anirudh

Abstract

In today’s time, natural fibers are available abundantly and do possess properties such as biodegradability, light weight, good strength etc. due to which more studies are focused in order to develop a composite including natural fibers as their reinforcements. Bio-composites are considered versatile which have gained recognition in industrial material science domain. In this chapter, natural fibers of vegetable and fruit peels are considered as reinforcements and epoxy resin as the matrix to form a novel hybrid composite. The fibers considered in this chapter are onion, potato, carrot, lemon and sweet lime with epoxy resin as their matrix. These natural fibers are reinforced at 10%, 20% and 30% volume fractions. They are subjected to alkali treatment followed by developing the specimen. Then these specimens are subjected to tensile, density, flexural, water absorption rates and also microstructure characterization. Based on the properties obtained for the bio-composite, they are applied for a consumer product device and analysed using ANSYS software. Among all of the developed composites, epoxy lemon yields the optimum results.</jats:p>

Topics

• density
• microstructure
• polymer
• strength
• composite
• resin
• lime