Characterization study on mechanical, thermal conductivity and water absorption properties of silane-modified Plumbago zeylanica stem fiber and wheat straw extracted biosilica particle reinforced polyester composite

Human development in past few decades are growing rapidly and their demands over earth sources are also increased rapidly. This resulted exploitation of natural resources and creation of pollution due to utilization of large fuel consuming heavy metals. To provide solution to this lightweight composite material are preferred in most of industrial and transport vehicle sectors. This present study aims to de- velop a lightweight polymer composite using surface modified Plumbago Zeylanica stem fiber and wheat straw biosilica reinforced polyester matrix. The utilization
of natural source of reinforcement and that too after surface modification provide better strength and make unique sense to the composite material. To understand their performance the composites are developed based on hand layup process and testing such as mechanical, thermal conductivity and water absorption are done in accordance to the ASTM standard. The result of this composites shows that maxi-
mum tensile, flexural, ILSS, and IFSS strengths of 126 MPa, 162 MPa, 68 MPa and 18.9 MPa are obtained by the silane-modified stem fiber of 40 vol% and 3 vol% of silane-treated biosilica particle in the composite PNB2, which is 173.91%,
138.23%, and 277.77% better than plain composite P. The primary reason of these enhanced strength characteristics is the silane-treated fiber or filler’s stronger con-
nection with the matrix and it is better viewed through SEM analysis. Nevertheless, the composite PNB3 with 5 vol% modified biosilica reinforcement exhibits the
highest impact and hardness strength of 5.85 J and 85 shore-d. Comparably, the same composite PNB3 with that volume percentage of surface-treated fiber and filler exhibits a reduced water absorption rate of 0.21% and a maximum thermal
conductivity of 0.861 W/m-K, outperforming plain composite P by 209.71% and 61.90%, respectively. Thus, this light weight, better mechanical and thermal con- ductivity, water absorption properties of composites could potentially be applied in areas such as outer door panel works in automotive and aviation, enclosures setup in power industrial sector, domestic household, and roof top work in civil engineer-ing sector, etc.