Effect of Banana Peel and Titanium Dioxide Hybrid Fillers on Natural Weathering Degradation of Unsaturated Polyester Resin Biocomposites

Abstract

The composite used nowadays is made up of synthetic fibre, which does not satisfy the sustainability issue and is expensive. The making of a hybrid composite by using organic reinforcement with inorganic filler will show new advantages besides improving properties. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of natural weathering degradation study of unsaturated polyester (UPE) hybrid composite materials made up of different percentages of banana peel powder (20, 18, 16, 14 and 12%) and titanium dioxide (2, 4, 6 and 8%).  The fabrication method is used to combine banana peel powder and titanium dioxide to produce a hybrid composite by using a hot press machine. The hybrid composites were exposed to natural weathering for two weeks before being tested. The chemical constituents, mechanical properties and surface morphological characterisations before and after natural weathering exposure were also evaluated. Mechanical characterisation done by a universal testing machine (UTM) has found that the U80B12T8 hybrid composite with the highest percentage of titanium dioxide (8% titanium dioxide and 12% banana peel powder) demonstrated the highest tensile properties for both before and after weathering degradation. The surface morphological study conducted by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) shows that a composite with 20% banana peel reinforced 80% UPE (U80B20) presented the highest degradation with high cracking of banana peel fibre inside the UPE matrix, which contributed to the low composites’ mechanical properties. A hybrid composite with 12% banana peels incorporated with 8% titanium dioxide reinforced 80% UPE (U80B12T8) demonstrated low degradation, with almost no cracks and voids.  This proved that the presence of titanium dioxide could reduce the degradation of hybrid composites against natural weathering.