Sisal fibril epoxy composite—a high strength electrical insulating material

Environment friendly high strength electrical insulating material was developed using fibrillated sisal and epoxy resin. Coarse sisal fibers were fibrillated into fibrils using mechanical disintegration. Fibrillated fibers provided a high strength, renewable, light weight dielectric variant reinforcement to epoxy resin. Different weight fractions (10–35%) of Agave sisalana fibrils were thoroughly mixed with epoxy resin system to develop composites. Chemical treatment was employed to improve the surface as well as chemical composition of sisal fibril to enhance mechanical strength and electrical insulating properties of composite. Chemical treatment of fibrils improved the tensile strength from 47.4 to 51.99 MPa at 35 wt% loading of sisal fibril in epoxy composite. A few important predictive models namely rule of mixture, Halpin–Tsai, Nielson Chen and Manera model were compared with the experimental values obtained in this present study. Nielson Chan model predicted the experimental data most accurately with an average relative error of 15.82%. Similarly the dissipation factor touched a level of 0.097, thereby indicating good insulation properties of composite. The tests were conducted at lower frequency range to higher frequency range 1–10 kHz and the composite material exhibited stability at high frequency range as compared to low frequency range. POLYM. COMPOS., 39:E2175–E2184, 2018. © 2017 Society of Plastics Engineers