An assessment of the water absorption properties of an orange peel particulate-based epoxy composite by optimisation

Abstract

Biocomposites are numerous and of increasing use in a wide range of composite applications in recent years. To achieve an overall low life-cycle cost, water absorption characteristics are of significant interest. Despite the availability of numerous water absorption studies on green fillers, investigations with particular focus on orange peel particulate (OPP) composites are still missing from the literature. An experiment was conducted to measure and optimise the water absorption behaviour of an OPP epoxy composite using the Taguchi method. Microstructural examination of the water-absorbed specimens was done after several days of immersion using scanning electron microscopy. This was done to understand the water absorption mechanism and analyse both water-eroded surfaces as well as the eroded debris using SEM morphological analysis. Results showed that a 5% OPPs composite showed greater water absorption than a pure epoxy sample across all the periodic readings. This was due to the presence of orange peel particles in the composites. The Taguchi method obtained optimal parametric setting of A1B1C1 for both materials, which corresponds to low water absorption values for the pure epoxy and 5% OPPs composite. The final masses of pure epoxy and 5% OPPs composite were found to have the highest percentage contribution to the water absorption optimisation using analysis of variance (ANOVA). Furthermore, application of the Pareto 80-20 rule to the Taguchi optimisation yielded results in agreement with the ANOVA at a high level of significance regarding water absorption properties.

Keywords

• Water absorption
• Taguchi method
• Epoxy
• Composite
• Pareto