A New Developed Environmentally Friendly HighPerformance Composite

With increasing concerns about environmental protection, natural renewable materials become more and more popular in many applications including a variety of building products, automotive, infrastructure, and other industries. Natural fiber polymer composites have drawn a great deal of interest in recent years because these materials posses high potential to achieve great property improvement. The resulting composite has technical advantages during production and performs much bettercompared to those made with synthetic fibers. In this book, the design fundamentals of manufacturing high performance hemp/acrylic composites were explored. The effects of various fiber treatments on physical and mechanical properties of the hemp/acrylic composite were investigated. A detailed study of some thermo-physical properties, including density, heat capacity, and thermal conductivity of the fiber, resin, and composite were described. A three- dimensional finite element model was developed to simulate the heat transfer and cure behavior of a complex geometry of the composite duringmanufacturing and compared with experimental results.