Track: Advance manufacturing process

Abstract

Bagasse is a form of natural fiber which obtained from sugarcane. It’s the inner soft layer of the sugarcane stick which can be extracted from sugarcane stick after the removal of the sugarcane juice and sugarcane residue collected from sugar mills and street sugarcane juice producing vendors. Bagasse can be a good alternative of the other widely used natural fibers due to its wide availability, lower in cost, bio-degradability etc. Bagasse needs to be extracted and chemically treated to magnify its mechanical properties as chemically treated bagasse fibers shows better mechanical properties than the untreated fibers. The extracted fibers used to fabricate several composite samples using the additive manufacturing or the 3D printing method by a stereolithography (SLA) type 3D printer. 3D printing is a 3-dimentional object manufacturing method from a programable digital model by adding material layer upon layer and SLA is a popular type of 3D printing method which is basically a liquid resin photocuring procedure where liquid resin is put in a reservoir placed over a laser beam and photopolymerization is started by scanning a positionally programmed laser over the resin surface. The basic criteria behind using an SLA type 3D printer is that the liquid resin which is the most widely used matrix for fabricating natural fiber composite can be used as the printing material and SLA 3D printed objects has other advantages like high accuracy, good surface quality, fit for testing etc. This paper discusses about the applicability of SLA type 3D printer for the fabrication of natural fiber particularly bagasse fiber reinforced composite. These samples are fabricated following the ASTM standard (ASTM d638, type-4). Mechanical property test like tensile test has been conducted to analyze these samples, to investigate the mechanical properties of these SLA printed bagasse reinforced composites, to observe the impact of SLA type 3D printing on the mechanical properties of bagasse reinforced composites and to determine the applicability of this fabricated composite material.