Investigations on tensile and flexural behaviors of sugarcane fiber/boron nitride/fly ash reinforced polymer matrix composite

Abstract The scientific world always encourages researchers for new material development. This work makes an attempt to develop new epoxy polymer composite with reinforcements from reusable/recyclable/biodegradable materials. Fly ash, boron nitride (BN) and sugarcane fiber are reusable/recyclable/biodegradable materials used as reinforcements in this composite. This work attempts to investigate the influences of wt% of reinforcements such as fly ash, BN, and sugarcane fiber on tensile and flexural behaviors of composite. In order to prepare composite samples with different wt% of reinforcements, one of design of experiment approaches, response surface methodology (RSM) is used. In RSM, central composite design model is utilized to get the composition of different reinforcements in composite samples. Analysis of variance is employed to find the effect of wt% of different reinforcements on tensile and flexural behaviors of composite. To study filler interaction and morphology, scanning electron microscope, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy tests are carried out. Results disclose that level of influences of BN and fly ash are significant for tensile and flexural behaviors respectively.