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In this work, woven jute and glass fabrics were used as natural fiber and synthetic fiber reinforcements, respectively, and unsaturated polyester resin was used as a thermoset polymer matrix to fabricate jute/polyester and glass/polyester composites via compression molding. As expected, glass/polyester exhibited superior performance than jute/polyester composites in terms of mechanical properties and moisture uptake behavior. Further, both composite laminates were exposed to gamma (γ) irradiation at a dose of 5 kGy to enhance their performance. After γ-irradiation, it was revealed that tensile strength, bending strength, tensile modulus, bending modulus, and impact strength increased by approximately 14, 28, 20, 21, and 13%, respectively, for the case of jute/polyester composites while glass/polyester composites demonstrated 13, 27, 15, 14, and 22% increase of the values, respectively. Further characterization of the composite samples was performed via moisture uptake in water and salt solutions, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), and Energy Dispersive Spectrum (EDS) analysis.
Mahmud et al. (2023) studied this question.