An Investigative Study on Production of a Composite Novel Plant Fibre: Mechanical Properties Comparison

摘要

This paper introduces a production process of identifying and producing a novel natural fibre from an indigenous source tree with the intention of reducing the dependency on imported high-quality natural fibres from outside Africa. Commercialized plant fibres from plants like Sisal generate income for their host countries in Central American and European regions. This plant is used in polymer matrix composites as a load-bearing member. This paper identified three plants - Sparmania Africana, Ficus lutea and Ficus sur, of which only the Ficus trees were investigated. The properties investigated were the uniaxial tensile strength and Young's Modulus as these properties enabled the researchers to characterise the material strength. The Ficus lutea out-performed the Ficus sur in terms of the true strength and the engineering strength. The two are almost the same for both materials at 97% when compared. On average, maximum strength is about 22.6 and 17.5 MPa at breaking, with Ficus lutea greater than Ficus sur. Research is statistically valid with a P-value of less than 0.05, this paper achieved a P-value of 0.001162. In addition, the two Ficus plants did not perform well when compared to Sisal plant.