Physical and Thermal Behaviour of Maize Husk Reinforced Epoxy Composite

Environmental awareness today motivates the researchers, worldwide on the studies of natural fiber reinforced polymer composite and cost effective option to synthetic fiber reinforced composites. The availability of natural fibers and ease of manufacturing have tempted researchers to try locally available inexpensive fibers and to study their feasibility of reinforcement purposes and to what extent they satisfy the required specifications of good reinforced polymer composite for different applications. Maize husk is a by-product of maize milling process that usually finds inadequate final disposal. Composites filled with maize husk flour are materials that offer an alternative for using this agricultural resource viewing the production of low dense materials with some attractive thermal properties. In present paper, hand lay-up technique is used to add maize husk in epoxy matrix with different loading. The various thermal properties like thermal conductivity, coefficient of thermal expansion and glass transition temperature of the fabricated composites were evaluated experimentally under controlled laboratory conditions. Moreover, the measured values of thermal conductivity are compared with the values obtained from various well established theoretical models and found to be in good agreement with each other.