Biodegradation behaviour of green composite sandwich made of flax and agglomerated cork

Abstract

Material experts are striving to use natural resources as skin and core in composite sandwiches to achieve light weight, biodegradability, and cost benefits. This paper reports one such newly developed green composite sandwich and its biodegradable behavior. The skin and core of newly developed sandwich are flax fiber and agglomerated cork respectively. This composite sandwich is manufactured by vacuum bagging technique in order to get higher volume fraction of fiber. The biodegradability testing of the composite sandwich has been executed by soil burial test. The verification of the same has been done using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis and Thermoanalytical test. The test results portray the percentage of weight loss in the specimens and that, it increases with burial time. It also depicts that the newly developed Green Composite Sandwich (GCS) has 82% higher degradation than the Synthetic Composite Sandwich (SCS) taken for the comparison. SEM images show that the green composite sandwiches have lost their fibrous structure and cell wall surface due to the degradation. FTIR and Thermoanalytical tests also confirm the biodegradability of the developed green composite sandwich.

Durability of sandwich structures with a maximized natural raw material basis: comparison of expanded polystyrene, cellulose foam and polylactic acid subjected to UV-rain aging

“…Aged EF-EPS-Co, EF-EPS-Ad and EF-PLA-Ad series had less than 10 % effect on toughness due to degradation. These results essentially agree with the degradation of bio-materials, such as those based on cork and PLA [16] [17]. It should be noted that, for many of the FTS specimens, the core splice failed so that tiny strings or shreds were left unbroken and they could carry slight load after the specimen was practically failed.…”