Structural, Mechanical and Electrical Properties of Nelumbo Nucifera Fibers

Abstract

In view of exploring the structural and elasto-mechanical properties of the Nelumbo Nucifera (lotus) fiber cultivated in India, the Powder X-ray diffraction data (PXRD) of this fiber is utilized. The PXRD data was used along with Peakfit® software for the background data correction and to simulate the data. Checkcell® has been utilized to obtain the microstructural and lattice parameters. Our sample belong to monoclinic crystal system and lattice parameters are a = 7.784 Å, b = 8.201 Å, C = 10.380 Å and β = 96.28°. Using Debye Scherrer equation, the crystallite sizes along all the Bragg reflections were calculated and employing first principle calculations, the crystallite size has been plotted and concluded that, the size is not ellipsoidal as predicted by earlier researchers, in specific it is multidimensional in shape and depends on the existence of ordered region. The X-ray diffraction data is used along with Treloar’s principle to obtain the 6×6 elastic tensor matrix, and the same has been plotted using Elastic Tensor Analysis tool. This result has shown that the lotus fiber is anisotropic in nature. The dependence of frequency and temperature on the dielectric properties of Nelumbo Nucifera fibres were studied in the frequency range 50 Hz to 5 MHz and in the temperature range 27oC to 100oC. Functional Data Analysis has been utilized to obtain the correlation among various microstructural parameters.