Mechanical property of jute fibre reinforced polymer composite filled with clam shell filler: a marine waste

The present work utilises clam shell, a marine waste as filler material in a natural fibre composite.Different contents of clam shell filler of 0, 5 and 10 wt.% are considered for preparing the composite by the hand lay-up technique. The addition clamshell filler in the composite improves the tensile strength and tensile modulus by 51.40 and 63.47 % from 0 to 5 wt.% of clam shell filler, respectively. Similarly, flexural strength, flexural modulus and inter laminar shear strength of the composites show the maximum value at 5 wt.% filler addition. Beyond this value, the mechanical strength is reduced. Hardness values of the composites are increased with the increase in inclusion of the clam shell filler. In contrast, the addition of filler reduces the impact strength of the composites. Again, to determine the viscoelastic behaviour of the jute epoxy composite with the clam shell filler, dynamic mechanical analysis is performed. Storage modulus and loss modulus are found to be increasing with the increase in wt.% of filler. For all composites, the damping factor improves with the increase in temperature and obtained the highest height in the transition region. It is low below the glass transition temperature.