Experimental And Finite Element Analysis on the Mechanical Performance of Hybrid Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Composites

Fiber reinforced composites are the new age materials, which play a major role in the service sector and engineering field. 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. Nevertheless, experimental testing of each new laminates is a time consuming and expensive process. In this work, comparative study on the results of the mechanical performance of glass/kenaf and glass/aloe Vera fiber reinforced epoxy composite laminates obtained using both experimental testing and Finite element Analysis Method (ANSYS 16.2) is done to find the closeness between the results from the two methods. The laminates are prepared using vacuum assisted resin transfer molding method (VARTM), and the tensile and flexural tests are carried out based on ASTM standard. The comparison of the experimental and FEA method shows that the variation in results is only between 8 to 3%, in two types of laminates, proving that the Finite element method is equally effective, less time consuming and economical for composite analysis.