Engineered Material from Natural Fibre for Interior Design Applications

Muhammad Sayem, AS, Haider, Julfikar and Sayeed, MM Alamgir (2021) Engineered Material from Natural Fibre for Interior Design Applications. In: The 91st Textile Institute World Conference: Integrating Design with Sustainable Technology, 23 July 2018 - 26 June 2018, University of Leeds, UK.

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Abstract

Some natural fibres including jute, flax, hemp, kenaf and sisal have been found very promising for potential applications as reinforcement in engineered composite materials. The environmental drivers, such as ability to absorb CO2 during production in contrary to synthetic materials and having non-toxic characteristics, have made them ideal candidates for incorporation into composites for industrial and technical applications that do not require very high mechanical resistance, for examples, window and doorframes, indoor furniture panels, automotive panels and upholstery, parcel shelves, noise insulating panels etc. This paper discusses fabrication and mechanical performance testing of multi-layered jute fabrics reinforced thermoplastic composite material. Jute hessian fabrics were sandwiched in 0° orientation into several layers of High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) polymeric sheets and pressed at high temperature and pressure to form composite laminates. Microscopic analysis revealed that the fibre and yarn orientation of fabrics within composite remained intact and no visible void was identified. Mechanical performance of the composites having a small percentage of fibre content was found to have improved significantly when compared to the pure HDPE laminates. The tensile and flexural strength of the laminate composite with optimum number of layers (6-layer makes a weight fraction of 18.50%) were improved by more than 50%, while flexural modulus was also increased significantly. Fracture morphology of the composite investigated by a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) showed good adhesion of the jute fabrics with the polymer matrices.