For a lot of years, extensive research was carried on the use of natural fibers in automotive sector to meet the environmental regulations as well as to increase the profit margins of company. Natural fibers being of low cost, recyclable and lightweight provide industry with the best alternative for traditional materials such as steel, aluminum and synthetic fiber. Applications such as car door panels, sun visors, seat covers and rearview mirrors have provided excellent scope for usage of natural fiber-reinforced polymer composites. Various car manufacturers have successfully implemented natural fiber-reinforced polymers in some of their car models in recent years and have yielded desirable results in terms of lightness, cost saving and reduction of environmental pollution. Various factors such as combinations of fibers, layer sequence, fiber-to-matrix ratio and manufacturing method influence the properties of the composite specimens. The natural fibers used are flax, hemp and kenaf. Epoxy is selected as a matrix material. Hand layup method was used to fabricate the specimens as well the car door panel. The mechanical testing was carried out to determine the tensile strength, flexural strength, hardness and impact strength according to ASTM standards. The composite with most desirable mechanical properties is chosen to fabricate the final car door panel. This paper also discusses about the optimization of influencing parameters for drilling the natural fiber-reinforced epoxy plate using Taguchi method. Spindle speed, feed rate and drill bit diameter are selected as input parameters. These parameters which influence the thrust force are measured by using drill tool dynamometer.

The usage of natural fibre as reinforcement in polymer composites has increased in the recent years with rising concerns of environmental pollution and the heavy dependence on synthetic fibres from petroleum products of the middle east and the amount of material available in the tropical countries for such low prices. These materials can decrease our dependency on conventional materials like plastics, thereby decreasing the amount of pollution we cause on disposal and manufacturing of those. In general, the impact strength of the natural fibre composites is considered to be low and this experiment quantifies these results. This research describes the fabrication of a polymer composite, using banana fibre as the reinforcement and epoxy as the polymer matrix. A sequence of samples was prepared by varying various parameters like length, volume fraction and treatment of the fibre. The parameters were optimized using Taguchi’s DOE and the combination of parameters which yields us the best result and the contribution of each parameter. The impact strength has been studied using IZOD impact tester. The work has quantified that the impact strength of the composite depends mostly on the volume fraction and also only up to a certain range and then decreases as we increase the quantity of fibre. The same goes with both alkali treatment and length of the fibre which also contribute respectively. The optimum length, volume fraction and chemical are 1mm, 25 wt% and 2% NaOH treatment shows better result.