Experimental Study on Effect of Coconut Leaf Spathe on Mechanical Properties of Chopped Glass Fibre Reinforced with Thermoset Composites

Use of Natural fibre based composites in structul applications has been increasing day by day due to abundant availability of natural resources and non-biodegradability of synthetic fibres. Present work utilizes most widely availbale agrowaste utilized in the form of coconut leaf spathe as a reinforcement. Neat Composites were developed from chopped Glass fibre reinfoced composite (GFRC) with the epoxy volume fraction of 60:40 respectively and in other set, biocomposites are developed from hybridization of spathe fibres with choppped glass fibres as Spathe reinforced hybrid composite (SRHC) in the ratio of 50:50 by volume of fibre without change in matrix volume fraction. The samples were devloped through manual handlayup route followed by compression molding. Developed composites were subjected to mechanical tests such as tensile and flexural tests. Experimental Results concluded that presence of spathe fibre influence consdierably on tensile characteristics of fibre reinforced composites reporting considerable 12.7% increase in ultimate tensile strength. However introducing coconut spathe fibre as rienforcement lowers the flexural characteristics of the sample where maximum load carrying capapcity and bending modulus will be reduced by 36% and 38% respectively due to reduced interfacial bonding between fibre and epoxy matrix. Present study also perform Regression analysis to achieve the experimental correlation for tensile and flexural test results. SEM analysis has been done to understand the failure mode of samples.