Review: Textile-based natural fibre-reinforced polymeric composites in automotive lightweighting

Environmental stringent norms, weight reduction, and the ever-depleting mode of petroleum resources have stimulated the use of textile-based natural fibres as reinforcement in polymeric composites. Natural fibres play a significant role in the sustainability of an environmentally friendly future. Natural fibres-based composites have fulfilled the environmental norms and contribute to developing lightweight materials with improved mechanical properties in the automotive sector. The automotive industry is yielding substantial steps towards a more environmentally friendly product by adopting textile fibres as a reinforcement for making various automotive parts, such as door panels, boot lining, instrument panel support, sun visor, wheel box, interior insulation, trunk panel, roof cover, and bumper. The growth rate of natural fibre production is increasing day by day. Each year, high energy-consuming products and synthetic fibres-based composites are being replaced by natural fibre-reinforced polymeric composites because natural fibre-based composites have excellent mechanical properties, relatively low cost (one-third of the cost of glass fibre), low density, and recyclability. This review analysis contributes an overview of the concept of vehicle weight reduction, properties required for composite materials to be used for automotive, most commercially used natural fibres and their use for automotive applications focusing on the matrices for the natural fibre composites (NFCs), natural fibre properties and potential challenges coupled with the use of natural fibres, surface modification methods of some natural fibres being used in the automotive industry and recent advancements in textile fibre-reinforced composites. Thermal properties and processing techniques of natural fibre-reinforced composites (NFRC) are also studied.