Enhancement of Thermal Insulation Property of Epoxy Based Composites Using Short Natural Fibers

Abstract

The whole constituents of earth including humans, animals, machines and materials all are greatly dealing with the heat or more specifically temperature and its effects. There are basically two effects performed by any aspect of environment as far as the heat transfer is concern. These are either to promote the heat transfer or to retard the heat transfer. From these two factors most of the engineering and social application needs to retard the extra amount of heat transfer or we can say that it needs to have an insulation property. It is also essential for comfort and in some cases, for the survival of animals and humans by means of having some proper insulation medium. This heat retarding property or insulation has many advantages in industries. It also resists the damage due to freezing of various matters or damage of matters by high temperatures. In real practice thermal insulation provides a lot of applications like pipe insulation, building insulation, thermo flasks and in food containers etc., which stretches the attraction of many researches in past few decades. Increasing the mechanical and surface properties of the insulation added the extra charm in the field of research and development. As describing the importance of insulation, insulation needs to be thermally stable, light in weight, mechanical strengthen and having low conductivity. Looking to these properties, only new generation composite materials can meet the same as expected. In field of insulation epoxy, a thermo setting plastic composite has a tremendous vision of importance that attracts most of the research works. Epoxies are very good insulator. To increase its insulation ability the Synthetic Fiber like glass fiber, nylon, carbon fiber etc. or the natural fibers like husk, palm fiber, coconut sheath etc. are considered to be potential filler material for various applications like wear resistant and structural components. The natural fiber has tremendous economical and thermal insulation factor than the synthetic fiber which is the primary base of this research paper. Here the bismarckia palm fiber is considered and analyzed on basis of different aspect ratio, fiber loading and orientation by Finite element analysis by using ANSYS MECHANICAL APDL package. Here in this paper fiber loading from 0% to 19.20% is considered for analysis with a cube-cylinder model in ANSYS. In this research it has been found that the shorter is the aspect ratio the more effective insulation property is achieved. Also the horizontal fiber orientation gives a better insulation property than the vertical orientation of fiber. Then the whole result is compared with experimental and analytical models. The experimental analyses for getting the values of equivalent thermal conductivities for different fiber loaded samples are being performed in UnithermTM 2022 device. This paper also emphasize to compare the results with some of the well-known fibers like glass, banana etc. it has been found that palm fiber gives better insulation capacity as compared to the other two. The microstructural analysis of the composite is carried out by SEM. Further the glass-transition temperature and the co-efficient of thermal expansion values for different fiber loading is obtained experimentally by using thermo-mechanical analysis. The glass transition temperature is increasing with fiber loading as expected and the co-efficient of thermal expansion is decreasing with the fiber loading conditions. Lastly the percentage of voids is calculated for different samples. Finally it has been concluded with some of the very important factors regarding insulation when compared to various above mentioned conditions.