The Effect of UV Irradiation on Tensile Strength of Polypropylene Reinforced Kenaf Fiber and Peat Soil

Abstract

Nowadays, natural fiber polymer composites have been widely used in many industries and applications because of their low cost, renewable and eco–friendly. However, exposing this material to the outdoor environment will affect the material properties as it is exposed to various situations such as ultraviolet exposure, raining, etc. This paper studies the degradation of kenaf fiber, polypropylene strengthened with peat soil combustion at 600ºC upon ultraviolet exposure. The wood–plastic composites (WPCs) produced into two batches, kenaf fiber mixing with polypropylene and kenaf fiber and peat soil mixing with polypropylene. All the specimen has exposed in ultraviolet (UV) irradiation at 0 hour, 100 hours, and 200 hours, respectively. The UV irradiation accelerated weathering tester machine was conducting the water spray cycle, which is 4 hours of water spray and 8 hours without water spray continuously until achieved the target time. The finding obtained from the tensile test, the composition with the highest contain of kenaf fiber in a polymer composite, has the lowest tensile strength after exposed with 200 hours of UV irradiation, which is 20.23 MPa. While the adding peat soil as reinforcement has shown the increasing the percentage of tensile strength after 200 UV exposure.