ABSTRACT
Today scientists and engineers working on materials are very much concerned with environment protection and sustainability issues. Conventional materials are depleting day by day. Now day’s natural fibers are widely used to replace the conventional synthetic fibers. Natural fibers come with many positive and eco-friendly attributes but they cannot be utilized in the same fashion. There are various reasons behind it such as inhomogeneous structures of fibers, dimensional stability, degradation and aging etc. Green composites have to undergo various alterations and modifications in order to make it a potential candidate for industrial applications. In this chapter various types of natural fiber reinforced composites (NFRCs) and methods used to enhance the mechanical characteristics of NFRCs is discussed and explained. Mechanical characteristics such as tensile strength, flexural strength, modulus of elasticity, rigidity, stiffness are highly dependent on factors such as matrix type, filler type, processing, post-processing treatment and many other application-specific factors. In order to utilize the green composites on the full pace there are various methods available for improving the mechanical characteristics such as chemical treatments, surface modification, blending, hybridization, corona discharge and many more. This work covers the detailed investigations done so far to improve the properties of the NFRCs and effect of treatments methods adopted. This chapter procures the valuable insights into the fabrication processes of natural fiber oriented composites, characterization procedures and their different functional properties and industrial applications. This work presents the exhaustive study on the effect of fiber reinforcement, effect of fiber size, interfacial bonding and effect of treatments.
