INVESTIGATION OF SISAL FABRIC DENSITY ON MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF POLYMER COMPOSITES

Manufacturing of natural fibre reinforced Polymer composites exhibit comparative mechanical properties with glass fibre composites. Due to this reason these categories of composites replace the synthetic fibre composites in all the industrial application. Few of the natural fibres such as sisal, jute and hemp possess higher specific strength, lightweight, biodegradability and low cost. In this study, sisal fiber reinforced epoxy composites prepared with varying areal density of the woven fabric and their mechanical properties such as tensile strength, flexural strength and impact strength were evaluated. The Sisal fabric composites were prepared with four different fabricGSM and the influence of fabric areal density on mechanical properties were studied. It is concluded that up to 650 GSM fabric areal density the tensile properties were increasing after that there would be the reduction in mechanical properties, which is attributed that the increase in fibre volume fraction will leads to increase in composites mechanical properties and then reduced.