Abstract
In recent years, from necessity of eco-friendly materials, biodegradable plastics have been developed. These materials as substitutes of conventional plastics have attracted a lot of 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 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 known. In the present study, we use a bamboo fiber as the reinforcement and polybutylenesuccinate (PBS) as the matrix. We fabricate long fiber unidirectional composites with different fiber volume fraction. We conduct tensile tests which tensile direction is 0, 45, and 90 degree and evaluate the mechanical properties of these composites. We discuss the experimentally-obtained properties based on the mechanical properties of the constituent materials.
