After agricultural harvests and pruning, billions of tons of agro-wastes are occurred on Earth. Only a small amount of the agro-waste is used as fertilizer and fuel and the rest is not evaluated. The remaining waste can cause air pollution if it is burned in the field. For this reason, this large amount of waste can be used as a reinforcement or filler to produce polymeric composite products. In last decade, the development of natural fiber/polymer composites has gained popularity in many applications such as decking, siding, and automotive indoor parts due to their environment friendly characteristics, low cost, low density etc. In this study, the effective utilization of rice husk (RH) and vine stem (VS) as natural reinforcing fillers in polypropylene (PP) based composites was evaluated. PP matrix composites containing different weight fraction of RH (10%, 20% and 30 %) and hybrid RH-VS-PP matrix composites were manufactured to observe the mechanical (tensile and flexural strengths, and Young's and flexural moduli) and thermal (degradation, melting, and crystallization temperatures etc.) properties of the composites. The RH-PP and RH-VS-PP composites exhibited much better mechanical and thermal properties compared to neat PP. Tensile strength of PP was increased by 10 wt.% of RH addition from 22.3 MPa to 31.0 MPa. The highest flexural strength which is about 55.0 MPa, was obtained by 3RH-7VS-90PP among all composites. Increases in storage modulus of 10RH-90PP, 20RH-80PP, and 30RH-70PP are 21.7, 29.0, and 33.4 %, respectively, when compared to that of PP at 35 °C. When 3wt% VS filled into RH-PP composite, degree of cristallinity (Xc) of the composite was increased approximately 2% as compared to that of 10RH-90PP.
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