Studies on mechanical and thermal Behaviors of calotropis gigantean Fiber reinforced epoxy composites

Abstract

The requirement of plastics is rapidly increasing as we use its various forms in our everyday life. Initially plastic was assumed to be harmless and inert but many years of plastic disposal into the environment has led to environmental pollution as most of the countries do not have efficient and adequate system for handling of plastic waste. The most pressing environmental issues due to plastic pollution are global warming and climate change. Nearly 90% of plastics are produced from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. Depletion of fossil fuels at an alarming rate is a great concern to the industry and researchers. This has prompted to identify environment friendly, biodegradable composite materials as an alternate to fossil fuels. In this work, an attempt is made to find a partial solution to avoid the dependance on fossil fuel by replacing the man-made synthetic fiber reinforcement in the composite materials, with natural fiber. Industries are moving towards accepting natural fiber as the reinforcement material in the fabrication of composite sheets. The present work utilizes Calotropis gigantea plant fiber, which is abundantly available with no vegetation value in India, as a reinforcement material in the fabrication of composite laminates. The extracted fibers from the Calotropis gigantea plant stem were subjected to chemical analysis to find its physical properties and chemical composition. This was further validated through Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. Totally, thirty different compositions of composite sheets were fabricated with six different fiber lengths ranging from 25 mm to 150 mm and five different fiber weight percentages ranging from 10% to 50% newline newline newline