Harnessing of Waste Rubber Crumb and Development of Sustainable Hybrid Composite Using Kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus) for Structural Applications

The present work aims at harnessing the rubber crumb in polymer matrix composite for structural purposes. The hybrid composites were made utilizing the hand layup method using rubber crumb with varying weight percentages of 1.5, 3, and 5. The physio-mechanical characteristics of hybrid composites were compared to the unfilled kenaf epoxy composite. The results showed that adding a rubber crumb helps to offset the disadvantage of natural fibers absorbing water, as the water absorption of composites filled with 5 wt% rubber crumb was decreased by 2.4 times when compared to unfilled composites. The inclusion of rubber crumb, on the other hand, increased the density of the composites. When compared to the unfilled composite, the tensile and flexural strength of the composite with 3 wt% rubber crumb was shown to be superior, increasing by 24.5% and 36.83%, respectively, and the impact strength of composite containing 5 wt% rubber crumb was enhanced by 54.33%. The VIKOR technique, which is part of the MADM methodology, is successfully used to pick the optimal configuration of the suggested hybrid composites and it indicates that composite with 5 wt% of rubber crumb is the optimum weight percentage that can be conveniently used in the proposed composite.