Tensile behaviour of chemical treatment for bamboo epoxy composites

Previous studies proved that mechanical properties of natural fibres reinforced polymer composites are excellent and competent to be utilised in high-tech applications. In contrast, the presence of chemical constituents such as cellulose, lignin, hemicellulose and wax substances in natural fibres preventing them from firmly bind with the polymeric resin and thus, resulted in poor mechanical properties of composites. To overcome this defect, modification of fibre surface was done by chemical treatment. In this study, the effect of 1 %, 2 % and 3 % concentration of sodium hydroxide solution on tensile behaviour of the bamboo reinforced epoxy composite was studied. The result showed that treatment with highest studied concentration significantly influenced the tensile properties of the composite. Thus, indicates that the treatment has done excellent work in modifying the surface of bamboo fibre for better adhesion with epoxy matrix

The effect of recycled – high density polyethylene (hdpe) mixing ratio on the tensile strength of high density polyethylene (hdpe) polymer

High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) polymer is widely being used nowadays. The advantages possessed by this polymer make it more preferable than metals. Lightweight, ease of manufacture, stronger and tough are HDPE specialties that make it as the top choice by manufacturers. However, the main disadvantages about this material is that their decaying consumes much time and this effects the environment as this material will dispose as wastes if they could not longer being used. Also, cause loss to certain companies. Therefore, ways to overcome this problem must be found, which is by recycling process. In recycling HDPE polymer, there is one method that mostly been used which is by mixing the recycled HDPE with pure HDPE with certain percentage of both materials. In this project, the pure HDPE were mixed with recycled HDPE according to determined percentages. The samples produced then will undergo tensile test in order to determine the percentage which posses the optimum tensile strength. In the end of experiment, it showed that the mixture with 90% of pure HDPE with 10% recycled HDPE is the best percentage compared to others. This experiment was conducted by following ASTM D638

Mechanical properties of bamboo reinforced epoxy sandwich structure composites

In the composite industry, natural fibres have great potential to replace synthetic fibres like carbon and glass, due to their low cost and environmentally friendly materials. Bamboo is emerging as a versatile reinforcing fibre candidate because this woody plant has a number of advantages, such as being naturally strong, biodegradable and abundantly available. In this study, a compression test with a crosshead displacement rate of 1 mm/min was conducted on square and triangular honeycomb core structures based on bamboo-epoxy composites so as to study their specific energy absorption. Both square and triangular honeycomb structures were manufactured by the slotting technique. Initially, a tensile test with the same crosshead displacement rate was conducted to study the tensile strength of unidirectional bamboo-epoxy composites with 0°, 45° and 90° fibre orientations. Bamboo-epoxy composite laminates were fabricated by applying a hand lay-up technique. The experimental data showed that the unidirectional bamboo-epoxy composite with 0° orientation offered the highest tensile strength. This indicates that the bamboo is stronger when parallel to the tensile axis. Meanwhile, the triangular honeycomb bamboo-epoxy structure offered about 10% more energy absorption than the square honeycomb structure, which indicates that the smaller cell size of honeycomb is able to absorb more energy than the bigger one