Tensile Strength of Woven Kenaf Reinforced High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) Composites

Environmental awareness and depletion of petroleum resource issue have triggered an enormous interest in utilizing natural fiber as environmentally friendly and sustainable materials as an alternative to the existing material. Therefore, this project aims to study the tensile strength of woven kenaf fiber reinforced HDPE composites. The raw materials for this project were continuous kenaf fiber from India and HDPE pallets. The kenaf was weaved to produce a structured fiber instead of continuous or short fiber. Two composition of HDPE/woven kenaf fiber were used i.e. 90/10 and 80/20 to produce the composite materials using compression molding technique at processing temperature of 17 The s mples were underwent tensile test according to ASTM D638 standard. It is found that the tensile strength of the composite increase with the increase of fiber content. HDPE/woven kenaf of 80/20 wt.% showed an improvement of 16.6 % in tensile strength compared to neat HDPE.