Abstract
Recently, there has been a tendency for scientific studies to deal with natural materials as fillers and reinforcement for polymer composites, which are used in many different applications due to their environmentally friendly properties when compared to synthetic materials. The current study aims to preserve the environment by dealing with natural materials and their influence on the mechanical properties and water absorption property of the polymer composites. In this study, epoxy composites were produced from local natural sourced non-hazardous raw natural materials using grey relational analysis (GRG). The materials used for fabrication include micro-filler of pollen palm 50 μm, seashell 75 μm and epoxy resin. Nine different composites were prepared using pollen palm and seashell as reinforcement material by varying the wt % of the micro-filler. Rule of the mixture was used for formulation and wt % of (0.5, 1 and 1.5) % reinforcement and 99.5, 99 and 98.5 % epoxy (binder) were used for composites. Grey relational analysis was conducted in order to scale the multi-response performance to a single response. The results indicate that optimum performance can be achieved with the addition of 1.5 wt % micro-filler of seashell, which achieved the first rank, while the second rank achieved by 0.5 wt % micro-filler of palm pollen and seashell when compared to other composites. The addition of micro-fillers has improved greatly the mechanical properties of epoxy composites. The loading of micro-fillers has influenced the water absorption property of composites based epoxy in ascending order
Highlights
At recent days, there is a great interest from several associations and researchers in employing the natural materials like cellulose nanofibers and seashell in the composites industry
Adding pollen palm or seashell fillers at 1.5 wt % would increase the flexural strength if compared to the original value of epoxy as a base case
The mechanical properties and water absorption property were compared against the original base case of epoxy composite
Summary
There is a great interest from several associations and researchers in employing the natural materials like cellulose nanofibers and seashell in the composites industry. This is due to their excellent mechanical properties of good biodegradability, renewability, low cost, and availability besides low thermal coefficient. Cellulose has been approved as one of the best natural materials to synthesis both plastic and thermosetting polymers [1,2,3] In this respect, natural fillers such as oil palm [4, 5] and seashell filler [6] have been successfully used as filler reinforced polymer composites. The results showed that the tensile modulus was increased by about 10 % for the compounds of 2 wt % and 8 wt % [7, 8]
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