• Vignesh, P.

Abstract

Increase in production capacity of industries in every field results into generation of huge amount of waste materials. These wastes can be utilized in an effective manner; one of those ways is fabricating a green composite which uses natural fibres and biodegradable materials in place of synthetic fibres as reinforcements. This is the main drive behind selecting sugarcane fibre and fly ash as our reinforcement materials for making epoxy polymer matrix composite. For further improvement in mechanical properties, carbon nano tube (CNT) is also used as reinforcement material in the composite. It is intended to investigate tensile behaviour of the composite by varying the wt. % of CNT / sugarcane fibre / fly ash in epoxy polymer matrix. Experimental specimens are made using Central Composite Design (CCD) of Response Surface Methodology (RSM), one of the Design of Experiments (DOE) approaches. Determining the influence of CNT / sugarcane fibre / fly ash reinforcements on the tensile behaviour of epoxy composite is achieved by using ANOVA. Results reveal the positive effect of sugarcane on yield strength and Young’s modulus of the composite and that of fly ash and CNT on ultimate tensile strength. Optimized parameters are obtained to achieve improved tensile behaviour and the same is confirmed by confirmation experiment.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• surface
• polymer
• Carbon
• experiment
• nanotube
• strength
• yield strength
• tensile strength
• biological composite