The Effect of Hybridizing Natural Fibers and Adding Montmorillonite Nanoparticles on the Impact and Bending Properties of Eco‐Friendly Metal/Composite Laminates

Abstract

Producing structures, which have composite features (high strength and stiffness with low density) and metal properties (high toughness and deformability), was the idea, which resulted to introduce the fiber metal laminates (FMLs) as new advanced materials. [1] In these materials, the metals and composites can stick to each other by using polymeric adhesive agents. In most cases, the metals are used as the skins and the composites as the core of these structures. [2] The adhering can be done by the same used resin into the composite section or using another adhesive agent. The carbon-reinforced aluminum laminate (CARALL), [3] aramid-reinforced aluminum laminate (ARALL), [4] and glass laminate aluminum-reinforced epoxy (GLARE) [5] are the most favorable FMLs, which are reinforced by carbon, aramid, and glass fibers, respectively. Although these famous structures can respond to all mechanical properties, however, environmental issues like recycling these structures are one of the important limitations of FMLs.Although many attempts have been done to reduce these limitations, however, after recycling, most of the fibers lose their initial mechanical properties. [6] For this reason, other types of fibers like mineral or plant-based fibers have been developed to use in the composite core of FMLs. [7] One of the suitable fibers for this purpose can be basalt fibers. The comparison between the mechanical properties of basalt and glass fibers was done by Deák and Czigány. [8] The reported results in this work showed that tensile strength, elastic modulus, and strain at the breaking of basalt fibers (Kamenny Vek Co., Russia) were 2016 MPa, 61.9 GPa, and 3.56%, respectively, whereas these properties in glass fibers (Skoplast Ltd., Slovakia) were 1472 MPa, 57 GPa, and 2.71%, respectively. This shows that basalt fibers have higher mechanical properties than glass fibers. Also, the production costs of basalt fibers are lower than carbon fibers. [9] The higher thermal stability and environment friendliness are other features of basalt fibers. [10] Having these features encouraged the researchers to use these fibers in various novel FMLs. For example, Ferrante et al. [11] characterized the impact properties of basalt fibers/aluminum FML through a low-velocity impact test. In another interesting work, Medjahed et al. [12] fabricated the FML with the basalt fibers/phthalonitrile composite and an Al-Li alloy. Then, they characterized the mechanical and gamma-ray shielding performances of this FML.In the admirable work, Mottaghian et al. [13] used the FMLs as the skin of polyurethane-based sandwich panels to enhance the postbuckling performance of sandwich structures. It is worth noting that the hybrid basalt-glass fibers/epoxy composite as core and steel or magnesium metals as skins were used in these FMLs. Introducing basalt-flax fibers/titanium as a new kind of

Effect of zinc oxide surface treatment concentration and nanofiller loading on the flexural properties of unsaturated polyester/kenaf nanocomposites

“…Another factor that can affect the flexural strength of nanocomposites with a greater nanoparticle weight fraction is the aggregation or clustering of the nanoparticles [ 60 ]. As the concentration of nanoparticles increases, there is a greater chance for them to agglomerate or form clusters, which can lead to heterogeneity and reduced flexural properties [ 61 , 62 ]. When the concentration of nanoparticles in the nanocomposite rises above a certain threshold, the particles begin to agglomerate [ 63 , 64 ].…”