Effect of Human Hair Fibre Reinforcement on Physical and Mechanical Properties of Polymer Composites for Automotive Applications

Natural fibre reinforced polymer composites have played major role in variety of applications because of their light weight, high specific strength, recyclability and biodegradability. Light weight composites in automotive components results in excellent fuel efficiency and lesser CO2 emission leads to induce various manufacturers to use natural fibres as reinforcement for their product. Past studies on synthetic fibre reinforced composites such as glass, carbon, aramid, Kevlar etc. possess sufficient mechanical properties but field of applications are very limited because of higher cost of material production and more weight. The present work concentrates on the fabrication and characterization of polymer composite with human hair as the reinforcement and epoxy as the matrix material. Eight different types of natural fibre polymer composites were fabricated with four different set of fibre volume fractions (15:85, 20:80, 25:75 and 30:70 % ratio of fibre and matrix respectively). Then the samples were prepared according to ASTM standard for testing mechanical properties such as impact energy, Rockwell hardness and physical properties such as density and water absorption. Theoretical density of composites was determined for validating actual density of fabricated composites. Rockwell hardness was measured on both dry and water absorbed composite samples. Internal structure between fibre and matrix was analyzed by using Scanning Electron Microscope.