Influence of Copper Foil Reinforcement on the Mechanical and Drilling Efficiency of Sisal/Flax Epoxy Composite 2020-28-0416

In this developing world, the need for lightweight and high strength materials is increasing in various industries. As a result of the above, the importance of natural fiber is also increasing to satisfy the industrial need. In manufacturing industries in order to assembly the engineering components the drilling is one of the important operations. The main objective of this research is to determine the mechanical properties and drilling efficiency of natural fiber composite. Sisal/flax as a natural fiber, the copper foil of thickness 0.025mm as structural reinforcement and epoxy resin as a matrix was used for making composite. The hand layup technique was used for the fabrication of the composite. Two different types of the composite were fabricated such as C1 (Sisal and flax fiber, embedded with punched copper foil (Ø5mm), 20mm apart and 90° to each other) and C2 (Sisal and flax fiber embedded with a punched copper foil of (Ø4mm), 20mm apart and 45° to each other). After the fabrication of composite, the test sample was cut and tested according to ASTM standard. The mechanical properties such as flexural, tensile and impact were determined. The CNC milling machine was used to test the drilling efficiency of the fabricated composite. In this research, it was found that the impact strength of C1 (1.23J) was better than C2 (1.03J), the flexural strength of C2 (49.99MPa) was better than C1 (26.57MPa) and tensile strength of C2 (16.4 MPa) was better than C1 (14.9MPa) specimen. The fabricated sandwich composite can be used in the fabrication car door panels, the dashboard of automobile vehicles.