Studies on water absorption behaviour of bamboo-epoxy composite filled with cenosphere
Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites
Published online on April 04, 2014
Abstract
This paper deals with the evaluation of water absorption properties of natural fibre composites consisting of bamboo fibre as reinforcement, epoxy as matrix and cenosphere as particulate filler at different environmental conditions. Hand lay-up technique is used to fabricate the composites with varying number of layers of bamboo fibre and cenosphere filler content. Water absorption kinetics of the composites is presented in this paper. It is observed that the rate of water absorption depends on the fibre content as well as filler content. Addition of filler in the layered bamboo–epoxy composite decreases the moisture absorption capacity and maximum reduction is observed to be 21% and 32% for distilled and sea water conditions, respectively, in seven-layered composite with 3.0 wt% filler.