Fabrication and Testing of Natural Fiber Reinforced Hybrid Composites Banana/Pineapple

Work has been carried out to investigate the flexural properties of composites made by reinforcing banana and pineapple as the new natural fibers into epoxy resin matrix. The natural fibers were extracted by retting and manual process. The composites are fabricated using banana and pineapple fiber reinforcements. Hybrid composites were prepared using banana/pineapple fibers of 0/40, 15/25, 20/20, 25/15, and 40/0 Weight fraction ratios, while overall fiber weight fraction was fixed as 0.4Wf. It has been observed that the flexural properties increase with the increase in the weight fraction of fibers to certain extent. The hybridization of the reinforcement in the composite shows greater flexural strength when compared to individual type of natural fibers reinforced composites. All the composites shows increase in flexural strength in longitudinal direction. Similar trends have been observed for flexural modulus, inter laminar shear strength and break load values.