Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
Polymers (Basel), 2020 Aug 26;12(9).
PMID: 32858857 DOI: 10.3390/polym12091923

Abstract

Natural fiber reinforced composites have had a great impact on the development of eco-friendly industrial products for several engineering applications. Sugar palm fiber (SPF) is one of the newly found natural fibers with limited experimental investigation. In the present work, sugar palm fiber was employed as the natural fiber reinforcement. The composites were hot compressed with polyvinyl butyral (PVB) to form the structure of laminated composites and then were subjected to tensile testing and moisture absorption. The maximum modulus and tensile strength of 0.84 MPa and 1.59 MPa were registered for samples PVB 80-S and PVB 70-S, respectively. Subsequently, the latter exhibited the highest tensile strain at a maximum load of 356.91%. The moisture absorption test revealed that the samples exhibited better water resistance as the proportion of PVB increased relative to the proportion of SPF due to the remarkable hydrophobic property of PVB in comparison with that of SPF.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.