Biodegradation behaviour of green composite sandwich made of flax and agglomerated cork

Abstract

Material experts are striving to use natural resources as skin and core in composite sandwiches to achieve light weight, biodegradability, and cost benefits. This paper reports one such newly developed green composite sandwich and its biodegradable behavior. The skin and core of newly developed sandwich are flax fiber and agglomerated cork respectively. This composite sandwich is manufactured by vacuum bagging technique in order to get higher volume fraction of fiber. The biodegradability testing of the composite sandwich has been executed by soil burial test. The verification of the same has been done using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis and Thermoanalytical test. The test results portray the percentage of weight loss in the specimens and that, it increases with burial time. It also depicts that the newly developed Green Composite Sandwich (GCS) has 82% higher degradation than the Synthetic Composite Sandwich (SCS) taken for the comparison. SEM images show that the green composite sandwiches have lost their fibrous structure and cell wall surface due to the degradation. FTIR and Thermoanalytical tests also confirm the biodegradability of the developed green composite sandwich.