FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF JOINTS IN FIBER BASED COMPOSITES

Abstract

The emerging world-level environmental awareness to reduce plastic pollution, use of new green material, and sustainable development regarding reuse & recycling of plastic material are increasing daily.Natural fiber composites are attracting more researches to solve the environmental issues and the attention towards development of NFC are increasing widely. The use of natural fiber-based polymeric composite are wide and To fabricate the near net shape products of NFC, so many methods like, Hand lay-up, Compression molding, and injection molding are in full bloom. Nonetheless, the secondary processes, like adhesive joining, machining process, welding, fusion joining , are unimpaired. In this research , two type of natural fiber (Jute and sisal) and two types of polymer material (polypropylene and polyethylene) are used as specimen material. The finite element analysis is carried out on the single lap joint configuration with 4 different hole arrangement. The ANSYS software is used and, to investigate the adhesive joining behavior, Analysis system "Static-structural" is used. The different geometry is prepared with "solid-works" software as per the ASTM standards. In addition, mesh sensitivity analysis is also being carried out to opt the optimized mesh size for the simulation.