Mechanical, Free Vibration and Modal Damping Behaviour of Treated Rice Bran Green Composite for 3D Printing Application Using RSM and Design of Experiment Method

Purpose The major aim of this study is to analyse the mechanical, thermal and free vibration behaviour of treated rice bran poly lactic acid (PLA) composite.Methods To evaluate the mechanical behaviour of the composite, tensile, flexural and hardness tests were performed. The thermal behaviour of the composite was analysed using thermogravimetric analysis of composite material. To analyse the water-absorbing capacity of the composite, a water absorption test was performed on the composite. Free vibration behaviour test was performed using an experiment setup, ANSYS and an analytical approach for the calculation of the first six natural frequencies, mode shapes and corresponding damping factors. The RSM model was obtained from a given set of data and the design of the experimental technique was used to optimize the model for finding out the best solution from the given data. ANOVA analysis was performed to check the significance level of the obtained results.Results The addition of treated rice bran in poly lactic acid enhances the stiffness of composite material and maximum tensile stress of 20 MPa and maximum flexural stress of 19.1 MPa were obtained for RPL1. The maximum hardness value of 10 HRF was obtained for RPL1. Next, the highest 8.8 HRF hardness was found for RPL2, that is, 12% less than the hardness of RPL1. The highest water absorption rate was obtained for RPL5. The addition of treated rice bran into PLA enhances the strength-weight ratio of composite material. The highest value of density 1.040 g/cm(3) was obtained for RPL1, while the lowest value of the composite density 1.011 g/cm(3) was obtained for RPL5. 92.4% weight loss was found at 500 degrees C for RPL1. The highest value of natural frequency and lower value for damping factor has been seen for RPL1 for RPL5 for all six modes. The RSM and DOE analysis show the optimum value of weight loss found at 500 degrees C.Conclusion It can be concluded that the addition of treated rice bran into poly lactic acid may be used as an eco-friendly biodegradable filler to minimize the cost of composite as well as reduce pollution and may be used as a 3D printer fluid for various low and medium-load structural applications.

Automated summary

The purpose of this study is to analyze the mechanical, thermal and free vibration behavior of treated rice bran poly lactic acid (PLA) composite. The addition of treated rice bran enhances the stiffness and strength-weight ratio of the composite material. The study also found that the treated rice bran improves the water-absorbing capacity of the material while reducing its density.