AN ASSESSMENT OF THE FAILURE OF FLAME RETARDANT BASED COMPOSITE LAMINATES UNDER MECHANICAL LOADING

Composite laminates have distinct interface comprising reinforcements from both synthetic or natural sources and polymers which make them favourable in the world of composites due to the intrinsic benefits they possess. Composite laminates from natural sources have shown to be highly susceptible to flame and have been improved by the addition of flame retardants (FR) during processing. The effect of the FR on the mechanical behaviour of these composite laminates is quite unclear and has not been given the in-depth attention. In this paper, the effect of FR of two set of composite laminates on mechanical failure was assessed. The two set of composite laminates comprising oil palm fibre composite (OPFC) and wood sawdust composite (WSC) were processed with polyester resin and six (6) FR using hand-lay compression moulding. The FRs were derived from aluminium tri-hydroxide (ATH), ammonium polyphosphate (APP), gum Arabic powder (GAP) and carbon black (CB) at 12%, 15% and 18% loading ratios. Specimen cut from the composite laminates were tested for failure under tensile and flexural loading using the universal testing machine (UTM). The results obtained shows that the addition of 15%APP-GAP/CB in WSC and 12%APP-GAP in WSC exhibited an outstanding performance in improving tensile and flexural strength of the composite laminates by 154% (from 9.67MPa to 24.56MPa) and 103.4% (from 42.14MPa to 85.7MPa) respectively compared to those without FR while the FR in OPFC did not show any significant improvements. It can be concluded that FR with particulate reinforcement could improve the mechanical behaviour of composite laminates as a suitable reinforcement.