Fabrication of Fiber reinforced composite material from Bamboo, Flex and Glass Fiber

Composites are essential for the aerospace, space, and automotive industry. In fact, a lot of structures and high-performance machines incorporate composites into their design. There are plenty of companies in India who perform composite analysis and manufacturing. Having knowledge and experience in the design and fabrication of composite material increases the employability of an engineer. In this project, you are going to fabricate a composite material in which multiple materials will be used as fiber. This will help you gaining knowledge of composite material too.

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Bamboo, Flex and Glass fiber are easily available materials and a great addition to the reinforcement phase of the composite material. Strengthening the reinforcement phase increases the strength of the composite significantly.

There are many processes to fabricate a composite material, such as hand lay-up, automated lay-up, spray-up, filament winding, pultrusion, resin transfer molding etc. but hand layup method is easy and cost-effective. You will use this process to fabricate this composite material. After fabricating the sample, you need to perform the Tensile test and Compressive test by making standard specimens of your sample in Universal Testing Machine.

Project Description:

1. Composite Material: Materials like Iron, Steel are better in tension but poor in compression, similarly Wood, Cast Iron is better in compression but poor in tension. To gain the benefit of having more such properties in one material we combine two or more materials in some arrangement. These types of materials are called composite materials.
2. Fibre Reinforced Composites: Fibre reinforced composites have been widely successful in hundreds of applications where there was a need for high strength materials. There are thousands of custom formulations which offer FRP a wide variety of tensile and flexural strengths. When compared with traditional materials such as metals, the combination of high strength and lower weight has made FRC an extremely popular choice for improving a product’s design and performance.
3. Bamboo fiber: Bamboo fibre is a regenerated cellulosic fibre produced from bamboo. Starchy pulp is produced from bamboo stems and leaves through a process of alkaline hydrolysis and multi-phase bleaching. Further chemical processes produce bamboo fibre.
4. Flex: Natural fibres are subdivided into different classes with flax being a bast fibre. Bast fibers bear the potential for industrial use based on their toughness and structural contribution. It has outstanding mechanical properties plus local availability. This will be a great addition to the reinforcement phase of your composite.
5. Glass fiber: Glass fiber is also known as fiberglass. It is material made from the extremely fine fiber of glass Fiberglass is a lightweight, extremely strong, and robust material.
6. Ployester: The polyester materials, while less costly, have lower strength characteristics and are less heat and weather resistant. As such though, they are the most widely used in commercial products. The epoxy, bismaleimide, phenolic, and polyimide matrix materials exhibit superior mechanical properties and heat resistance qualities.

Project Implementation:

1. To fabricate the composite first, you have to collect bamboo from your locality. Then you have to wash it thoroughly so that no impurities will be there.
2. After completing the above process, you have to dry the Bamboo nearly a day to remove any moisture present in it. Then you have to perform alkali solution treatment to kill bacteria present in it.
3. Then you have to cut alkali treated Bamboo into small fibers using the cutter.
4. Make a square box with one side open, using wood or Cast iron with dimension 100*100*20mm. This box will be used as a mold for fabricating your composite.
5. Then use polyethylene at the bottom of the mold to get the good surface finish.
6. Then start adding one layer of polyester and upon which put fibers layer by layer. Keep repeating this step, until you get desired thickness.
7. After this apply equal pressure throughout the mold so that both the material mixes together to form an effective composite material.
8. Then wait for few hours so that the mixture in the mold dries down and your composite is ready for tasting purpose.
9. Then make a few sample specimens for performing the various test. At least Make 3 standard specimen for each test.
10. Perform a tensile test using a UTM machine to find ultimate tensile strength, breaking strength, maximum elongation, and reduction in area. From these measurements, you can determine Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, yield strength, and strain-hardening characteristics.
11. Then perform the compressive test in the same machine to find out ultimate compressive strength, breaking strength etc.
12. Compare both ultimate tensile test and compressive test of your composite with the strength of parent materials.

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Project Brief: After successful completion of the project, you can observe that your composite will possess more strength in both compression and tension from the raw material which are used to fabricate and natural fibers are a great addition to the reinforcement phase of a composite material.

Hardware Requirements:

You will be needing a Universal Testing Machine (UTM), a Charpy impact test machine, Pin-on-disc wear testing machine, a Flexural testing machine for performing various strength test on your composite.

1. Universal Testing Machine: A universal testing machine is generally used to test the tensile stress and compressive strength of materials. It is able to perform many standard tensile and compression tests on materials, components, and structures, it is named as Universal Testing Machine (UTM). You need this machine to perform the various test on the fabricated composite material of yours.
2. Charpy Impact Test Machine: The Charpy impact test, also known as the Charpy V-notch test, is a standardized high strain-rate test which determines the amount of energy absorbed by a material during fracture. This machine you will use for the above purpose only.
3. Pin-On-Disc Wear Tester: Pin-on-disc wear testing is a method of characterizing the coefficient of friction, frictional force and rate of wear between two materials. As a particularly versatile method for testing wear resistance. You are going to measure frictional force and other parameter related to friction using this machine.
4. Flexural Testing Machine: These machines are used to test the flexural strength of a beam. Flexural strength is nothing but the banding strength of a beam under normal loading.

Software requirements:

Minitab: You can use this software for plotting and comparing your result data.

• Glass fiber
• Flex
• Bamboo Fiber
• Polyester

• Project on composite material
• Fiber reinforced composite
• composite material

Fabrication of Fiber reinforced composite material from Bamboo, Flex and Glass Fiber