An Investigation of Mechanical Properties of Hybrid Polymer Composites

Bamboo/Glass fiber reinforced polymer composites are replacing conventional metal alloys owing to their ecofriendly nature. Natural fibers as reinforcement offer number of advantages than traditional synthetic fibers. This paper aims to determine the mechanical properties namely, Tensile strength(TS), Impact strength (IS), Flexural strength (FS) and Hardness of hybrid composites reinforced with Bamboo/Glass fiber. The Treated bamboo fibers are mixed with the glass fiber in the proportion of 1:1, in order to reinforce in epoxy resin with different fiber lengths(5,10,15 mm) and fiber weight fractions of (20%,30%,40%). Experiments are planned according L9 orthogonal array in Taguchi's design of experiments. The control parameters considered were fiber length (Fl) and percentage Fiber weight fraction (Wf). In this work an attempt has been made to model the mechanical properties through response surface methodology (RSM). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to check the validity of the model. The results indicated that the developed quadratic models are suitable for the prediction of mechanical properties of the Bamboo/glass fiber reinforced epoxy composites. The experiment result reveals that tensile strength, flexural strength and hardness were decreased with increase of fiber length but impact strength increased with increase of fiber length.