Natural fiber reinforced composites have had a great impact on the development of eco-friendly industrial products for several engineering applications. Sugar palm fiber (SPF) is one of the newly found natural fibers with limited experimental investigation. In the present work, sugar palm fiber was employed as the natural fiber reinforcement. The composites were hot compressed with polyvinyl butyral (PVB) to form the structure of laminated composites and then were subjected to tensile testing and moisture absorption. The maximum modulus and tensile strength of 0.84 MPa and 1.59 MPa were registered for samples PVB 80-S and PVB 70-S, respectively. Subsequently, the latter exhibited the highest tensile strain at a maximum load of 356.91%. The moisture absorption test revealed that the samples exhibited better water resistance as the proportion of PVB increased relative to the proportion of SPF due to the remarkable hydrophobic property of PVB in comparison with that of SPF.

Brake friction materials play a crucial role to enable effective deceleration on the moving rail vehicle. Unfortunately, particulate matters generated by brake wear as well as during the brake manufacturing process are affecting the environment and human health. Due to this, the development of green friction material is important to improve environmental health, safety, and human health. To develop new environmental-friendly friction materials, it is important to understand the commercial brake block material components and their tribological performance. Characterisation techniques such as hardness test, pin-on-disc wear test, durability test, thermogravimetric analysis, morphology, density and porosity were performed on the commercial brake block, the obtained results were then compared with the existing literature. The experiment results showed that the performance of the commercial sample is superior to the available green friction composite materials. This indicates the necessity of a new formulation for the development of green friction brake block material that can give better or similar performance as commercial material. The results from this article can be referenced to develop the new formulation.