WAVINESS EFFECT OF FIBER ON BUCKLING BEHAVIOR OF SISAL/CARBON NANOTUBE REINFORCED COMPOSITES USING EXPERIMENTAL AND FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Sisal fiber-reinforced composites have huge potential applications in many industries. Different defects during the production process of the composite may decrease the performance of these composites. In the present work, one of the important defects such as the waviness of the sisal fiber has been studied under compressive loading. Two types of composite materials are considered for the study. One is sisal fiber-reinforced polymer matrix composite and another one is hybrid composite i.e sisal fiber and carbon nanotube reinforced polymer matrix composite. The sisal and hybrid sisal straight fiber composite specimens are prepared by using the hand lay-up technique. The buckling load of the sisal and sisal hybrid composites is estimated by conducting suitable experiments. Further, using the Finite Element method the effect of the waviness of sisal fiber on the buckling load is estimated. Two different wavy patterns such as Full Sine Waviness (FSW) and Half Sine Waviness (HSW) are considered for sisal fiber. The position effect of waviness of the fiber on the same property is also estimated by changing (A/λ) ratio from 0.1 to 0.35 by changing the amplitude of waviness from 5 to 17.5 mm (A) and maintaining the length of waviness (λ) to 100mm. The present study is used to design the buckling load of natural composite with waviness because the perfectly straight fibers are difficult to extract from plants.