Mechanical and Thermal Properties of Coir Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Composites Using a Micromechanical Approach

Abstract

Now-a-days, the natural fiber reinforced polymer composites are widely used due to their many advantages such as light weight, low density, ease of fabrication, renewability, biodegradability, nontoxicity and low cost of production. Prediction of various properties of fiber reinforced polymer composites is a challenging task for current simulation techniques, so does the need to understand the numerical simulation of such materials. The objective of the present works it to study the elastic and thermal properties of coir fiber reinforced epoxy composites with different fiber parameters using a micromechanical approach. The three-dimensional micromechanical models based on finite element method with representative volume element (RVE) are employed to predict the mechanical and thermal properties of composites from the constituent material properties. An attempt has been made in this work to develop a cost-effective and user-friendly composite material with better mechanical and thermal properties. The result obtained from the finite element analysis has been compared with the results of existing analytical approaches and found good agreement. It has been also been observed that the properties of composites are significantly affected by a number of parameters such as volume fraction of the fiber, geometry of fiber and RVE.