CONCEPT UALIZATIO N, DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF INJECTION MOLDING PROCESS FOR FRPS

Abstract

Natural fiber reinforced composites have made widespread impression in terms of numerous engineering applications because of their excellent environmental and ecological aspects. In the present research endeavor, the mechanical properties of injection molded short bagasse fiber reinforced polypropylene (PP) composites have been experimentally evaluated. Pure PP has been selected as matrix in order to compare the effect of reinforcement on the mechanical properties of the developed PP based composites. Bagasse fibers are selected as reinforcement due to their easy availability and low cost as compared to other natural fibers. Taguchi orthogonal array (L-27) is used to design the experimentation and ANOVA has been performed for the analysis of' the model developed. Statistical softwares (Minitab 11.0 and Design Expert version 7.0.0) have been used for the analysis process. Mechanical properties (tensile and flexural strength) of the developed composites have been evaluated as per ASTM 3039 and ASTM D7264. The experimental results establish that bagasse fiber reinforced PP composites show a significant improvement in the mechanical properties as compared to the neat PP. The experimental results reveal that both tensile and flexural modulus increase with an increase in the volume fraction of the reinforcement, and tensile and flexural strength are more for the developed composites as compared to the neat PP. The morphological study of the fractured specimens have also been carried out using scanning electron microscope (SEM) in order to analyze the failure mechanism of the 4' composite specimen. Thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA) has been performed to check the decomposition of the materials and the composites. X- Ray diffraction (XRD) method is used to check the crystallinity of the developed composites. The present investigation proposes that the bagasse fiber reinforced PP composites are potential candidates for replacing current injection molded PP products