Tensile and Flexural Properties of Grass/Epoxy Composites

The applications of synthetic fibrecomposites in industry are very significant especially in aerospace and automotive sector due to their excellent properties and low density. However, concern for environment has caused people to start looking forward to use natural fibre as reinforcement in composite. One of the natural fibres that need to be extracted its competency as the reinforcing component is grass (ImperataCylindrica). Grass is an invasive plant that grows at a disturbed area. The inexpensiveness and the abundance source of grass in this country has made is the potential candidate to be studied. In this research, the effects of length of5 %wt. discontinuous reinforcements (10, 15 and 20 mm)on tensile and flexural properties of grass/epoxy composites are investigated. The plates were produced manually by using hand stirring technique. The curing process was done at room temperature of 25°C for 24 hours without compression pressure. Then, tensile and flexural test was conducted with the crosshead speed on 20 mm/min. From the test, the mechanical properties of the composites are increasing with the fibre length. Besides, it is found out that the optimum fibre length of grass to reinforce the epoxy is 20 mm with the tensile strength, Young’s modulus, flexural strength and flexural modulus of 22.03 MPa, 1.38 GPa, 51.68 MPa and 4.77 GPa respectively. Besides, the addition of grass reinforcement in epoxy (GE20) shows the most significant effect in the flexural modulus of the composites where it increases approximately by 39 %.