Effect of silicon carbide on the mechanical properties of the rice husk, corn cob polymer matrix composites

Abstract

 Throughout the world there have been alarming concerns over the use of non renewable resources during manufacturing of goods and associated environmental legislations. Therefore, the use of natural materials and fabrication of composites there from, particularly, development of natural fibre reinforced polymer composites is gaining significant attention. Although natural fibre reinforced composites (NFRCs) show strong application prospects, various materials and processing related challenges needs to be addressed to achieve long-term stability and performance. The volume and number of applications of composite materials have grown steadily, penetrating and conquering new markets relentlessly. So everybody is concentrating on new materials which will be strong enough, less weight, recyclable with reduced cost. Hence all the researchers are concentrated on the composite materials which have all the above properties. The present work is concentrated on corn cob and Rice husk reinforced polymer hybrid composites. The composites specimen was fabricated with various weight percentages of corn cob fibres (25%,20%, 15%) , Rice husk (20%) and Silicon carbide(15%) combined with lapox-12 resin using hand lay-up method. So to obtain new composite materials different proportions of corn cob is added and the mechanical properties such as Tensile strength, Flexural Strength and Impact test were carried out for the samples cut from the fabricated composites specimen to the dimensions as per ASTM standard. With the increasing percentage of the reinforcements the performance of the material is improving. The tensile strength increases with the increase in corncob reinforcement percentage and flexural strength increases with the increasing in percentage of the rice husk and the impact strength of the material gets boost with equal proportional percentage of corncob and rice husk reinforcement.