Study of Tensile and Flexural properties of hybrid nettle and glass fiber reinforced polymer composites

Abstract

Composite materials are getting attention of researcher day by day because of high tensile strength and high weight to strength ratio. New materials are being developed for different application. Polymers when reinforced with natural fibers give advantage like low weight, high strength, low specific weight and bio degradability. Synthetic fibers have widely used for fabricating polymer composites. Now a days to make synthetic fibers composites more applicable, synthetic fibers are mixed with natural fibers. In this study hybrid composite of nettle and glass fiber is fabricated and their tensile and flexural strength is evaluated. Specimen are prepared with hand layup technique. Results indicated that nettle fibers when hybridized with glass fibers increases tensile strength and flexural strength. Flexural strength of nettle and glass fiber hybrid composite is largest among all specimen.