Study of the Physical & Thermal Behaviour of Maize Husk Reinforced Epoxy Composite

Environmental awareness today motivates the researchers, worldwide on the studies of natural fibre reinforced polymer composite and cost effective option to synthetic fibre reinforced composites. The availability of natural fibres and ease of manufacturing have tempted researchers to try locally available inexpensive fibres 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. With low cost and high specific mechanical properties, natural fibre represents a good renewable and biodegradable alternative to the most common synthetic reinforcement, i.e. glass fibre. The growing interest in the past few decades to produce green materials that can reduce the continual environmental problems posed by non-biodegradable synthetic polymer wastes has resulted to the development of composite materials that make used of biodegradable polymers. However, biodegradable polymers like thermoplastic starch suffer from having lower softening temperatures and lower modulus.