Results in Materials: Temesgen Batu, Hirpa G. Lemu
Results in Materials: Temesgen Batu, Hirpa G. Lemu
Results in Materials
journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/results-in-materials
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Keywords: The objective of the work presented in this article is to investigate the mechanical properties of false banana/glass
Hybrid composites fiber reinforced hybrid composite materials at different fiber volume fractions and orientation of hybrid (false
False banana fiber banana and glass) fibers. False banana/glass fiber reinforced hybrid composites were designed considering effects
Fiber orientation
of fiber orientation, volume fraction and then manufactured according to ASTM standards using hand-layup
Natural fibers
technique. The developed composites were then tested for their tensile, bending and compression properties.
The standard test methods recommended by ASTM-D 3039 for tensile properties, ASTM-D790M for flexural
properties, and ASTM-D3410M for compression properties were used to test the hybrid composites. Effect of
volume fraction and fiber orientation on composite materials properties was analyzed. The results show that both
volume fraction and fiber orientation significantly affect the mechanical properties of the hybrid composite of
false banana/glass fiber.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rinma.2020.100152
Received in revised form 23 September 2020; Accepted 9 October 2020
Available online 31 October 2020
2590-048X/© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
T. Batu, H.G. Lemu Results in Materials 8 (2020) 100152
Fig. 1. Extraction of false banana from enset plant manually a). Enset plant b). Manual extraction on plane wood c). Extracted false banana fibre.
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T. Batu, H.G. Lemu Results in Materials 8 (2020) 100152
prepared with six plies of fibers depending on the parameters presented mm. The loading arrangement and failure mode is presented in Section 3.
in Table 1. The 2:1 Epoxy resin to catalyst (hardener) chemicals were
mixed well and painted on the plies layer by layer to bind the fibers. At 3. Results and discussion
first, the aluminum foam was placed over the steel plate to prepare the
good and clean surface of the composite. Then Nelson wax is used as As stated in the previous section, the study reported in this paper
mold releasing agent between aluminum foil and the composite at the focuses on three tests as a function of two control parameters, giving in
end of the curing time. After that, the epoxy resin spread on the painted total six test scenarios. For all six test scenarios (designed composites) a
wax. The fibers are over placed one by one and painted up to the last total of three specimens were used for repeatability in each test. The
layer. Then, the prepared samples were compressed by wood compressor average values of the results are discussed in the following subsections.
machine with a pressure of 5 MPa to remove any trapped air. Then it was
left in the mold for 3 h under the same pressure and then the aluminum 3.1. Effect of false banana fiber orientation
foil was removed from the composite samples.
Tensile and compressive strength test: Three types of false banana
2.4. Mechanical property characterizations to E-glass fiber orientations ([G, 0B, G, 0B, 0B G], [G, 90B, 0B, G, 0B, G] and
[G, G, 90B, 90B, 90B, G]) in a constant short fiber randomly oriented glass
After composite material preparation, the tensile, compressive and fiber and for constant fiber volume fraction (B/G ¼ 25/25) were used for
three-point bending (flexural) tests were conducted for each specimen to tensile and compressive strength. For each of the orientations, three
evaluate the strength of each composite. The investigations were done on specimens were tested to obtain the average values. The testing process
a universile test machine (UTM) at 0.5 mm/min cross-head speed of the was continued until the specimen fractured, and the load at fracture point
machine for all test loads. is used to calculate the strength of the material specimen. Stress–strain
Tensile test: ASTM D3039 standard [15] was used for tensile testing curves of each composite for tensile and compressive strength under
of the samples. Tensile tests were performed on a universal testing ma- different fiber orientations are depicted in Fig. 4(a) and (b) respectively.
chine using a sepcimen geometry of 3 mm 20 mm x 220 mm and a As can be obserbed from both figures, the material response and hence
gauge length of 120 mm. During the test, the specimens were placed in the maximum stress sustained before fracture depends on the fiber ori-
the grips of the UTM and axial tensile load was applied at both ends of the entations. In other words, the plots in the figures show that the false
specimen. banana fiber orientation affects the tensile and compressive strength of
Compressive test: ASTM-D3410 standard [16] was used for tensile the false banana/glass fiber reinforced epoxy composite.
testing of the samples. Compressive tests are performed on a universal As depicted by the bar graphs in Fig. 5(a), the highest composite
testing machine using a specimen of 3.17 mm 25 mm x 155 mm. tensile strength obtained is 134.38 MPa, which occurred at fiber orien-
During the test, the specimens were placed in the grips of UTM and axial tation of 0 , (i.e. [G, 0B, G, 0B, 0B, G]), while the lowest tensile strength
compressive load is applied at both ends of the specimen. value is 50.31 MPa for fiber orientations in the transverse (90 ) direction.
Flexural test: The bending (flexural strength) is the ability of mate- Similar to the case of tensile strength, false banana fiber orientation of 0 ,
rials to resist fdeformation under an applied load. This test was per- among the three sets of fiber orientation, has the highest compressive
formed as per ASTM D790 standard [17] using UTM. The prepared strength, whose value is 47.357 MPa. The transverse (900) direction has
specimen has dimensions of 123 mm 20 mm x 3.2 mm. Further, the the lowest compressive strength, which is 13.863 MPa. Comparing the
support span to depth ratio is 32:1 and the support span length is 102.4 maximum strength levels of false banana/glass fiber reinforced epoxy
Fig. 4. Average stress –strain curves for various orientations (a) tensile and (b) compressive tests.
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T. Batu, H.G. Lemu Results in Materials 8 (2020) 100152
Fig. 5. Influence of fiber orientation of composites on (a) tensile and compressive strength and (b) tensile modulus of elasticity.
composites, the [G, 0B, G, 0B, 0B, G] orientation, the highest compressive
strength is about 35% of that of the tensile strength. The maximum
compressive stress in the other two orientations is about 28% of that of
the stresses in tensile test.
Fig. 5(b) shows bar graph representation of the calculated modulus of
elasticity in tension for the three sets of test samples. The modulus of
elasticity has similar trend as the variation trend of the tensile strength
given in Fig. 5(a). The highest modulus of elasticity value of 1375.3 MPa
was obtained by the fiber orientation of 0 , while the lowest tensile
strength value, i.e. a lowest elastic modulus of 457.24 MPa, is for fiber s
oriented in the transvers (90 ) direction. When all the considered results
are compared with pure glass, epoxy reinforced composite of fiber
orientation [G, 0B, G, 0B, 0B, G] has a high modulus of elasticity.
Many research results have confirmed that the highest strength of
fiber-reinforced composites is observed when the composites are loaded
in the fiber direction. The plots given in Fig. 5(a) are in full agreement
with previous research results such as in Ref. [18], where the composites
with the false banana fiber orientation at 0 exhibit the highest strength
Fig. 6. Flexural strength vs fiber orientation of composites.
values while the strength significantly decreased with changes in orien-
tation of the fiber from 0 orientation. The weakest strength is observed
hybrid composites under the same vol/wt fractions (B/G ¼ 25/25) are
for fiber orientation in transeverse or perpendicular direction of the
found to be 201.583 MPa, 109.33 MPa and 34.167 MPa respectively. In
loading direction. The same results are also observed by previous studies
other words, the highest and the lowest flexural strengths were obtained
such as Humberto et al. [19] who reported that composites with fibers
for false banana fiber orientation of 0 and 90 respectively. This
along the loading direction have high strength and modulus of elasticity,
behavior can be correlated to hybridization effect as false banana fibers
while the transverse direction has poor mechanical properties.
contributed higher flexural strength to the composite when oriented in 00
Flexural strength test: - The 3-point bending test is widely used to
directions. As can be observed, the strength in flexural load (3-point
determine the physical property of composite resin reinforced materials.
bending) shows similar trend as in the cases of tensile and compressive
Similar to the tensile and compressive tests discussed in the prvious
loading. This result matches with a study conducted by Mosharraf et al.
subsection, three types of false banana to E-glass fiber orientations were
[20]. in which the effect of fiber orientation on flexural strength of
used for the 3-point bending tests. The test was modeled as a simply
fiber-reinforced composite was investigated and concluded that the
supported beam with the load Fmax applied at mid-span of a rectangular
orientation of the fibers influenced the flexural strength of the
specimen of the span L between two rollers and the highest flexural
fiber-reinforced composites and the most effective position of the fibers is
strength was determined from Equation (1).
tension side (0 direction) reinforcement.
3Fmax L Comparison with pure glass fiber: For the sake of comparison, tests
σ bf ¼ (1) were conducted on samples of pure glass fiber (B/G ¼ 0/50) and the
2bh2
obtained average results are given in Table 2. The maximum values for
Where σbf ¼ stress in the outer specimen at mid-span, Fmax ¼ the hybrid composite of false banana and glass fiber for loading in fiber di-
maximum load at mid-span of the test beam, L ¼ support span, b ¼ width rection is also given in the table. The results indicate that the mechanical
of the sample and h ¼ depth of the sample.
The flexural test results are tabulated and presented for both cases
(under fiber volume fraction effect and fiber orientation effect) based on Table 2
the maximum values of the three specimens. The average results ob- Comparison of hybrid composite and results of pure glass fiber.
tained among the three specimens from each batch was used for the Average ultimate Average ultimate Average flexural
analysis. tensile strength compressive strength strength (MPa)
Fig. 6 shows the average flexural strength comparison of each (MPa) (MPa)
orientation used under this study. As can be observed from the figure, the B/G ¼ 0/50 96.89 43.73 165.5
flexural strength of the hybrid composites with orientation of [G, 0B, G, Hybrid B/G 134,38 47,357 201,357
0B, 0B, G], [G, 90B, 0B, G, 0B, G] and [G, G, 90B, 90B, 90B, G] of both ¼ 25/25
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T. Batu, H.G. Lemu Results in Materials 8 (2020) 100152
Fig. 7. Stresses –strain curves for various fibers volume fractions a) tensile and b) compressive tests.
properties, particulary theultimate tensile strength and the flexural The strength of the false banana/glass fiber reinforced epoxy com-
strength are significantly higher for the hybridized composite. posite as a function of fiber type and its volume fraction under
compressive load (Fig. 8(a)) shows similar trend as in the case of the
tensile strength test. Increasing the false banana fiber volume in the
3.2. Effect of fiber volume fraction hybrid composites contributes to lower compressive strength. The
highest composite compressive strength obtained in this study is 35.687
Tensile and compressive strength test: - Three types of false ba- MPa, which occurred for false banana fiber to glass fiber volume fraction
nana to E-glass fiber ratios (10:40, 25:25 and 40:10) in a 50% total fiber of B/G ¼ 10/40, while the lowest tensile strength value of 9.29 MPa was
volume fraction were used for the tensile and compressive strength tests. obtained at volume fraction of B/G ¼ 40/10. The maximum average
For each of the ratios, three specimens were prepared for repeatability. strength in compression is about a quarter of the strength in tensile test.
The average stress-strain results of tensile and compressive strength tests As can be observed from Fig. 8(b), the modulus of elasticity has
are given in Fig. 7. In both tensile and compressive test cases, the effect of similar effect to that of the tensile strength. The highest composite tensile
the false banana fiber volume fraction has similar trend in terms of the modulus is 1355.6 MPa, which occurred for false banana fiber to glass
maximum stress level achieved. For each volume fraction, the maximum fiber volume fraction of B/G ¼ 10/40. The lowest tensile modulus value
compressive stress level is about a fourth of the maximum tensile stress of 293.71 MPa was obtained for volume fraction of B/G ¼ 40/10. In other
level. The false banana/glass fiber reinforced epoxy composite with a words, the tensile strength and the modulus of elasticity increased with
volume fraction of B/G ¼ 40/10 behaves differently in terms of strain increasing the fiber volume fraction of the glass fiber. In a related study
response, where it sustained the largest strain under load in the case of reported in Ref. [21], the effect of fibre volume fraction on tensile
compressive loading. As can be observed from Fig. 7, in the case of behaviour of banana, pineapple leaf fibre, glass reinforced epoxy resin
sample B/G ¼ 40/10, the material at higher compressive load reaches a composite materials indicated that as the mechanical properties vary
point where sudden and appreciable increase in stress occurs without with varying fibre types. Hybridisation between glass fibre and natural
appreciable increase in strain because the material behaves almost rigid fibre has increased the tensile strength significantly.
just before failure. Flexural strength: Similar to the case with tests of the influence of
Comparative illustration of the tensile strength and the modulus of fiber orientation, fiber type volume fraction variation has great effect on
elasticity in tension is also illustrated in Fig. 8. The study indicates that the flexural strength results. Fig. 9 shows the comparative results of
the fiber weight fraction affects the tensile strength of the false banana/ values of maximum flexural strength average of the test samples under
glass fiber reinforced epoxy composite (Fig. 8(a)), where increasing the different fiber volume fractions. The flexural strengths of the hybrid
false banana fiber volume fraction in the composites decreased the ten- composites with volume fractions (B/G) of 10/40, 25/25 and 40/10 are
sile strength. The highest composite tensile strength for the designed found to be 222.083 MPa, 116.167 MPa and 54.667 MPa respectively.
composites is 156.67 MPa which occurred for false banana fiber to glass This result matches with the work reported in Ref. [7], where it is indi-
fiber volume fraction of B/G ¼ 10/40, while the lowest tensile strength cated that the variation of fiber type and their weight affect the flexural
value is 40.157 MPa and this was obtained at volume fraction of B/G ¼ strength properties of fiber reinforced composites. In all the three
40/10.
Fig. 8. Influence of fiber volume fraction on (a) tensile and compressive strength and (b) modulus of elasticity in tension.
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T. Batu, H.G. Lemu Results in Materials 8 (2020) 100152
Acknowledgments
References