Mechanical, thermal and impact damage characterization of hybridised long sugar palm/glass fibre-reinforced polymer composites

In this research, long sugar palm fibre was hybridised with long glass fibre produced by the hand lay-up method to improve the performance of the sugar palm composites. This study investigates the effect of glass fibre addition to the sugar palm-based composites and benzoylation effect to improve the mechanical properties of the composites. The study was divided into two stages, where the first stage results shows that the benzoylation treatment of the sugar palm fibre and the glass addition to the sugar palm composites has been demonstrated to significantly improve the physical, tensile, flexural and compressive properties of the sugar palm/glass fibre composites. The results obtained with regard to the physical and mechanical properties revealed that the EP/30TSPF/70GF composites exhibited the best physical and mechanical properties by increasing the tensile strength by 55.7%, flexural strength by 46.8% and compressive strength by 36.7% when comparing with EP/UTSPF composites. Similar results were acquired from the thermal testing using TGA, DSC and DMA. It was found that EP/TSPF/GF had better thermal properties compared to other composites. The second stage of the study investigated the impact properties and post-impact properties of the hybrid composites. The low velocity impact testing was applied to EP/30TSPF/70GF as it is the best formulation of the sugar palm/glass fibre composites, as concluded from the characterization results. After the impact test, ultrasonic scanning method (C-scan) was used to investigate the failure of the EP/30TSPF/70GF composite together with compression after impact testing (CAI). From the experimental studies, it could be concluded that the impact damage showed excellent correlation with the impact response. The damage area obtained from the ultrasonic C-scan images and CAI testing shows that the damage area increasing as the impact energy increasing and the compressive strength of the EP/30TSPF/70GF composite decreased as the impact energy increasing.

Text FK 2019 41 IR.pdf Download (1MB)

Actions (login required)

View Item