Abstract:
In the face of the increased global campaign to minimize the emission of
greenhouse gases and the need for sustainability in manufacturing, there is a
great deal of research focusing on environmentally benign and renewable
materials as a substitute for synthetic and petroleum-based products. Natural
fiber-reinforced polymeric composites have recently been proposed as a via
ble alternative to synthetic materials. The current work investigates the suita
bility of coconut fiber-reinforced polypropylene as a structural material. The
coconut fiber-reinforced polypropylene composites were developed. Samples
of coconut fiber/polypropylene (PP) composites were prepared using Fused
Filament Fabrication (FFF). Tests were then conducted on the mechanical
properties of the composites for different proportions of coconut fibers. The
results obtained indicate that the composites loaded with 2 wt% exhibited the
highest tensile and flexural strength, while the ones loaded with 3 wt% had
the highest compression strength. The ultimate tensile and flexural strength
at 2 wt% were determined to be 34.13 MPa and 70.47 MPa respectively. The
compression strength at 3 wt% was found to be 37.88 MPa. Compared to
pure polypropylene, the addition of coconut fibers increased the tensile, flex
ural, and compression strength of the composite. In the study, an artificial
neural network model was proposed to predict the mechanical properties of
polymeric composites based on the proportion of fibers. The model was
found to predict data with high accuracy.
