Factorial Study on the Tensile Strength of a Coir Fiber-Reinforced Epoxy Composite

This paper presents a factorial analysis on the tensile strength of a coir-based composite. Three interested parameters in this study are fiber volume fraction, curing time and compression load applied during fabrication of the composite. The experimental setting is based on the full-factorial design of experiments, which amounts to a total of 18 tensile test cases. Overall, the results from analysis of variance on the test data show that coir fiber volume fraction and interaction effect between curing time and coir fiber volume fraction are the prominent factors to the tensile strength of the composite. On the opposite end, the contribution from compression loading during fabrication of the material seems to be negligible.