Experimental and computational evaluations of the mechanical stresses of banana trunk fibre-reinforced epoxy resin composite in coffee table application

Abstract

Abstract The banana plant including the trunk is normally disposed after it has produced fruits once in its lifetime and becoming unproductive. Herbicide injection and burning using kerosene are the examples of current disposing method. Those methods are unfavourable owing to bad effects to the environment. Therefore, the unproductive banana trunk through its fibre properties, has a high potential to be used as composite in saving the environment. Three tensile test specimens were prepared with two of them have different length of banana fibres – shorter and longer than 0.5 mm, whilst another specimen has no fibres. The elastic modulus, Poisson’s ratio, and vertical load of 2 GPa, 0.3, and 981 N, respectively, were applied towards numerical models. The results exhibited that the composite with short banana fibre length promoted encouraging maximum and break stress values. Besides, the properties of the composite are well appropriate to be applied in furniture making as satisfactory stress value recorded in the computational analysis.