Modification And Fabrication of Selected Natural Fibres into Thermal Bonded Structures For Hybrid Polymer Composites

Abstract

Nature has abundance of natural fibres that are also renewable. Natural fibres are newlinevery essential to meet the environmental challenges that are growing every day in the field of technical textiles. Environmental friendly materials have come under consideration as a result of rising awareness, public interest, new environmental regulations, and unsustainable petroleum use. Synthetic fibres destroy the environment due to their nonbiodegradable and polluting nature, which leads to the utilization of natural fibre-based materials. In the last few years, natural resources have been considered as alternatives to synthetic fibres in several engineering applications. Acoustic materials assist in preventing newlineundesirable sounds from affecting the human ear, and these have major potential in build newlinetech, mobile tech, and home tech applications. A survey was conducted among the builders and persons involved in the civil field to obtain information regarding the potentiality of natural fibres in civil applications. From the survey, it was understood that green building concepts could be initiated as there was a problem of waste disposal. The locally available plant sources, namely Abutilon indicum, Agave americana, and Areca catechu, were selected, which were from different parts of the plants. These fibres were given chemical treatments namely Alkalization, Benzoylation, Acetylation and enzyme treatments with cellulase, pectinase and their combination for fibre surface modification. Then the fibres were assessed for visual evaluation, spectrophotometric analysis, chemical constituents, moisture content, regain, water absorption, density, tensile strength, elongation, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopic analyses (SEM), fourier transform infrared and spectroscopic analysis (FTIR).