Abstract
In recent years, biodegradable plastics which have low effect on environment have been developed and attracted attention. However, many of them have lower mechanical properties than conventional engineering plastics. When considering their application as structural materials, reinforcing them with a natural fiber is one of the candidates of reinforcing method without a loss of their biodegradability. On such natural fiber reinforced biodegradable plastic composites, only some combinations of fibers and matrices have been tried and the mechanical properties of them are not well understood. In the present study, we use a bamboo fiber as the reinforcement and polybutylenesuccinate (PBS) as the matrix. We fabricate both a short fiber reinforced composite and long fiber unidirectional composites with different fiber volume fraction. We conduct tensile tests on these composites and evaluate the mechanical properties. In addition, we measure the bamboo fiber strength distribution. We discuss the experimentally-obtained composites properties based on the mechanical properties of the constituent materials.
