Feasibility Study of Processing Natural Fiber Reinforced Plastic Composite by Injection Molding

Plastic injection molding is a common process of producing a plastic part. However, the method of producing natural fiber reinforced plastic is yet to be explored. This paper presents the comparison between a resin part and the natural fiber reinforced composite made by the injection molding process. In this study, the composite consists of polypropylene (PP) as the resin, and Kenaf as its fiber. The composite parts and the plastic parts were tested in tensile, flexural and impact tests. The results show an improvement of the parameters obtained from the flexural and impact tests by 10.2% and 15.4%, respectively.