Abstract
Oil palm fiber (OPF) extracted from empty fruit bunches is proven as a good raw material for bio-composites. The statistical variability in single fiber strength was observed due to the randomly distributed flaws along the fiber. In this study, the effect of gauge length on tensile strength of OPFs has been investigated. The Weibull/ weakest link distribution model was applied to analyse the statistical strength of OPFs. The modified Weibull distribution can predict the gauge length effect more accurately than the conventional Weibull distribution. In addition, the failure strength of the OPF was less sensitive to gauge length compared to coir fiber even though the OPF has a similarity in structures to coir fiber.
Highlights
Oil palm empty fruit bunch fiber, in short, known as oil palm fiber (OPF) [1] is a kind of seed hair to be obtained from oil palm industries [2]
A clean fiber surface can improve the accuracy of the statistical analysis
The average value of failure strength decreases with increasing in gauge length is probably due to the fact that the flaw sizes increase in larger fiber volume
Summary
Oil palm empty fruit bunch fiber, in short, known as oil palm fiber (OPF) [1] is a kind of seed hair to be obtained from oil palm industries [2]. Statistical approaches to assessing the mechanical properties are essential to analyse the high disparity of the mechanical properties and to quantify the variation of the probabilistic strength of OPFs. Recently, the Weibull/weakest link distribution [8] has been widely applied to the statistical analysis of mechanical strengths of natural fiber such as abaca [9], jute [10], okra [11] and flax [12]. The average value of σ can be predicted from the equation below once the Weibull distribution parameters (m, σ0) are obtained:. Zhang et al [20] suggested that the value of α in Equation (4) is related to the within-fiber diameter variation: ln (CV= FD ) α ln ( L) + A + ε (8). Considering all the above issues, it is important to determine a suitable Weibull model to predict the tensile strength of OPFs and other natural fibers which have the similar structures. The comparison of the statistical analysis by using the conventional Weibull distribution and the modified Weibull model is described in this paper
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