The Effects of Agro-Waste Reinforcing Fillers as Single and Hybrid on Mechanical and Thermal Properties of Polypropylene

After agricultural harvests and pruning, billions of tons of agro-wastes are occurred on Earth. Only a small amount of the agro-waste is used as fertilizer and fuel and the rest is not evaluated. The remaining waste can cause air pollution if it is burned in the field. For this reason, this large amount of waste can be used as a reinforcement or filler to produce polymeric composite products. In last decade, the development of natural fiber/polymer composites has gained popularity in many applications such as decking, siding, and automotive indoor parts due to their environment friendly characteristics, low cost, low density etc. In this study, the effective utilization of rice husk (RH) and vine stem (VS) as natural reinforcing fillers in polypropylene (PP) based composites was evaluated. PP matrix composites containing different weight fraction of RH (10%, 20% and 30 %) and hybrid RH-VS-PP matrix composites were manufactured to observe the mechanical (tensile and flexural strengths, and Young’s and flexural moduli) and thermal (degradation, melting, and crystallization temperatures etc.) properties of the composites. The RH-PP and RH-VS-PP composites exhibited much better mechanical and thermal properties compared to neat PP. RH-PP and RH-VS-PP composites showed an increase in thermal stability, which is indicated by shifting in maximum degradation temperature to a higher degradation temperature. Compared to RH-PP composites, the RH-VS-PP composites offered better flexural properties when the ratio of rice husk to vine stem was 3:7