No abstract

Fatigue life characteristic of hybrid composite reinforced metal laminate is a notable investigation since this kind of material offers several superior characteristics over conventional metallic alloy. A majority of the researches have focused on the mechanical properties of hybrid composite and conventional fibre metal laminate such as glass reinforced aluminium epoxy and aramid fibre reinforced aluminium laminate. However, investigation on the fatigue life behaviour of hybrid composite reinforced metal laminate still remains unexplored. In this study, the fatigue life characteristic of hybrid kenaf/glass reinforced metal laminate with different fibre configurations, orientation and stress ratio was presented. Fibre metal laminate was manufactured through hot press moulding compression method using annealed aluminium 5052 as the skin layers and the composite laminate as the core constituent. Tensile test was conducted at a quasi-static rate in accordance with ASTM E8 while tension–tension fatigue test was conducted at force controlled constant amplitude according to ASTM E466. Experimental results revealed that fibre metal laminate with 0°/90° fibre orientation exhibited better tensile and fatigue properties compared to fibre metal laminate with ±45° fibre orientation regardless of the woven-ply fibre configurations. Besides that, it was identified that higher stress ratio improves the fatigue life cycle of the fibre metal laminate structures.

This study investigates the effect of preheat temperature, blank holder force and feed rate on the formability of polypropylene based Fibre-Metal Laminates. Finite element method combined with Design of Experiments was used to determine the influence of the forming process parameters. The design of experiments was used to identify the relative influence of each process parameter considered in this study. A reduced set of coupled structural-thermal simulations using Ls-Dyna were carried out using a L9 orthogonal array. Simulations were carried out on the forming of domes. It was found that the blank holder force has the greatest influence to increase the minor/major ratios followed by feed rate and pre heat temperature. A more thorough investigation of preheat temperature illustrated an optimum preheat temperature at 130 °C.

Abstract. Pineapple leaf fiber (PLF) is one of the natural fibers that abundantly can be found in Malaysia, but the usage of the pineapple plant is limited only on their fruit and the other parts to be a waste. In this study, PLF is used as the reinforcement material and starch (SH) used as the matrix or binder. Both materials were combined with several compositions ratio (weight percentage) of PLF/SH composites which are 50PLF/50SH, 60PLF/40SH and 70PLF/30SH. Before undergo the fabrication process, the fiber has gone through an alkaline treatment to increase the strength of the fiber and chopped with an approximate size range from 0.5 mm to 5 mm. Besides that, SH powder is sieved to gain several particulate sizes which are 75 µm, 100 µm and 250 µm. The related tests such as flexural, hardness, density tests and macrostructure analysis have been done to determine their mechanical properties of composite. Based on the results, the sample with composition of 70PL/30SH with 75 µm has shown the highest result for flexural stress which is 14.49 MPa. While, the composite with the same composition of 70PLF/30SH with particulate size SH of 250 µm has shown the highest result in the hardness of 67 Shore-D and density of 1.36 g/cm3 respectively.