Experimental Investigation on the Mechanical, Thermal, and Morphological Behaviour of Prosopis juliflora Bark Reinforced Epoxy Polymer Composite

Abstract

Currently more emphasis is given to plants originated fibers for many applications due to their potential use in solving emerging problems concerning the environment. This research is based on evaluation of fiber concentration and treatment on physical, mechanical and thermal properties of untreated and treated Prosopis Juliflora (PJ) bark fiber reinforced epoxy composites. Composites were fabricated with varying weight % (i.e 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25%) of untreated and treated PJ bark fibers in epoxy resin using hand lay-up method. From the results obtained, it is obvious that the mechanical and thermal properties of composites reinforced with chemically treated fibers were enhanced due to fiber surface modification which helps in better bonding with matrix. Moreover, the composites with 20wt% fiber concentration shows good tensile strength, young’s modulus, impact strength and was found to be 84.22MPa, 3.94 GPa, 31.76 KJ/m2 and 59.18 MPa respectively. Finally, the failure analysis of fracture surface due to delimitation, pull-out of the fibers, percentage of voids and composite fracture has been verified using scanning electron microscope.

Keywords

• prosopis juliflora bark
• surface modification
• mechanical properties
• thermogravimetry analysis (tga)
• fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ftir)
• scanning electron microscopy (sem)