Natural fiber alfa/epoxy randomly reinforced composite mechanical properties identification

Abstract In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the international scientific community to study natural fiber composites. Natural fibers have interesting mechanical features, such as strength, lightness, and elongation at break. Natural fibers are also bio-sourced, biodegradable and recyclable. When used with plastic or recyclable matrices, natural fiber composites, such as alfa fiber, can also be reused and recycled. The growing global environmental and new environmental regulations have encouraged research on new recyclable composites environment friendly. The recyclable composite must satisfy minimal mechanical properties to be widely used in furniture, automotive or construction industries. To produce a natural fiber composite that can be fabricated widely, in this paper, composite materials were fabricated using the Epoxy resin as matrix and the natural Alfa fiber (tipa tenacissima L.) as reinforcement. The Alfa fibers are short and randomly distributed. Molding technique is used to produce the composite. To judge the usage of the composite in structural applications, the mechanical properties of the biobased composite are identified by numerical homogenization and by experiments. The finite elements numerical homogenization technique is based on a representative cell reinforced with short fibers. Tensile tests were performed. The experimental results validate the numerical model. The results show that reinforcing with Alfa fibers with a 10% volume fraction increase the elastic modulus by about 24.16% compared to Epoxy. Composite failure stresses reached 28.01 MPa which is higher than 14.64 MPa the value of the unreinforced Epoxy failure stress experimentally determined. With better arrangement and higher concentrations, such composites can at least be used for secondary structural uses.