EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON MECHANICAL PROPERTIES AND ELECTRICAL CONDUCTIVITY OF NATURAL FIBRE REINFORCED COMPOSITE

Mechanical Engineering

2nd National Conference on Recent Trends & Innovations in Mechanical Engineering

Composites are the most advanced and adoptable materials among all the engineering materials. The natural composites have advantages like low cost, biodegradable nature, recyclable etc. In this present work an attempt is made to develop a new composite material reinforced with natural fibre. Sheep hair mat and epoxy resin is used as reinforcement and matrix respectively in this research work. Hand lay-up process is followed with closed mould technique to produce the specimen. The volumetric ratio of 60:40 i.e. fibre to resin respectively is used for specimen preparation. To enhance the electrical properties of the specimen an aluminium powder is mixed with epoxy resin with the percentages variation of 0%, 10%, 20%, and 25%. The specimens are cut to the required dimensions and subjected to various mechanical and electrical characterizations. The result reveals that, the new composite has the good mechanical properties and offers the high resistance to flow of electricity. Also, it can be conclude that the tensile and hardness strength of wool based composite increases with the addition of aluminium metal powder. But, the compression and bending strength decreases with the addition of aluminium powder. Also, the wool based epoxy acts as bad electrical conductor and this property remains unchanged with the addition of aluminium powder up to 25% by its weight. Thus, an Epoxy composite enforced with sheep wool fibre can be used as insulator in production of electric circuit boards and other industrial applications.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.