Research and development of impact absorption foam made from kenaf core

Lee, Set Foon (2020) Research and development of impact absorption foam made from kenaf core. Project Report. Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Nowadays, nature fibre tends to replace the synthetic fibre use in the composite field. The reason behind this is the natural fibre has comparable mechanical properties compare to synthetic fibre. Besides that, the rise of environmental awareness of public about the used and advantages of the natural fibres such as biodegradable, low density and low cost has attracted the interest of many researchers to do an investigation on natural fibre. However, most of the researchers are focus in the use of the natural fibre as reinforcement to study the energy absorption of composite materials instead of using the core particles as reinforcement. As a result, there are no any reference regarding the relationship of different mesh size of kenaf core and its bonding structure when it has been used as reinforcement. Besides that, based on previous studies, there has conflict finding about different mesh size of particles use as reinforcement towards the energy absorption ability of composite foam. Therefore, the aim for this research was to investigate the impact energy and vibration energy absorption of composite foam with different size of kenaf core as reinforcement and different type of resin used. There were two types of resin used in this research, that was Polyurethane (PU) and Soft Epoxy (SE). Furthermore, the kenaf core particles with 3 mm mesh size was represented by alphabet A, 20 micron mesh size was represented by alphabet B, and 40 micron mesh size was represented by alphabet C. The objective of this study is to investigate highest impact and vibration energy absorption of composite foam according to the different layup sequence. There were 57 layup sequence has been investigated with two types of resin used. The composite foam was fabricated by using simple mixing process and cold press process to ensure the equivalent thickness of composite foam formed. In order to evaluated the impact energy and vibration energy absorption performance of the fabricated composite foam with different layup sequence, ASTM standard testing were conducted and scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to analysed the bonding structure of composite foam. The best layup sequence for impact absorption properties was ACC with SE resin used. This ACC layup sequence specimen was able to absorbed 9.90 J of impact energy, that was 33.9 % lower compared to pure SE specimen. CAA with PU resin used was the best layup sequence for vibration energy absorption. The magnitude rms value obtained by the CAA layup sequence was 7.298, that was 255.47 % increasing in value compared to pure PU specimen. The better performance of energy absorption can be obtained when the composite foam has higher porosity. This is further developed into motorcycle seat cushion due to its better vibration energy absorption performance. Lastly, the kenaf core particles used as reinforcement can reduced the weight of motorcycle seat cushion and more environmentally friendly.

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