THE MECHANICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF MONO AND HYBRID FIBER REINFORCED COMPOSITES USING EXPERIMENTAL AND FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS METHODS

Fiber reinforced composites plays a major role in service sector and engineering field. This creates interest for the researchers towards natural fibers as reinforcement which is already a highly used reinforcement material in many of the non-structural applications. These materials are tailor-made materials with a different volume fraction of resin and fibers and the stacking sequence could be made unique for each application depends on the strength requirement. Therefore, whenever engineers try to use a new configuration the proposed laminate has to be tested for its mechanical performance, experimental testing of each new laminates is a time consuming and expensive process. This work is aimed at the comparison of mechanical performances of natural fiber, glass fiber and hybrid fibers reinforced with polyester resin. The laminates are prepared with flax and glass and also glass/flax hybrid fibers, their mechanical properties like tensile strength and flexural strength are experimentally tested and also analytically achieved using Finite element Analysis Method (ANSYS 16.2). All the tests are carried out on standard ASTM sized samples. The comparison shows analytical results are better than the experimental results and there is a deviation of 0.5 to 25% in the results between the two methods of testing.