Free Vibration Characteristics of Natural Fiber Reinforced Hybrid Polymer Composite Beam

S. Madhu, M. Kumara Swamy

Abstract: Natural fibers are potential replacement for synthetic fibers in automotive and aerospace engineering in low load applications due to the low carbon footprint associated with them. Reducing the resonant amplitude of the vibration is an important issue in a machine component design process. Generally, damping associated with fiber reinforced composite structure is higher than conventional metal structures due to the visco-elastic behavior. Flax, Hemp and sisal natural fibers are used to fabricate polymer fiber reinforced Composites with different orientation of fibers using Hand Layup method. Vibration analysis of Hybrid Natural composite is carried out by using modal analysis with various Boundary conditions and compared. Natural frequencies and damping ratios are determined for all Hybrid FRP Composite samples using Ansys 15.0

Keywords: Hybrid Composite beams, Vibration analysis, Natural frequencies, Damping Ratio, ANSYS 15