One of the important issues in producing composite materials with natural fibres is the modification of the surface of the fibres to enhance adhesion and interfacial bonding with polymer matrix. In this report, the effect of alkalization on the mechanical properties, thermal stability and surface morphology of banana stem fibres is examined. The results show that treatment with sodium hydroxide...

Magnetoelectric 0-1 composites comprising CoFe2O4 (CFO) nanoparticles in a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer-fibre matrix have been prepared by electrospinning. The average diameter of the electrospun composite fibres is ∼325 nm, independent of the nanoparticle content, and the amount of the crystalline polar β phase is strongly enhanced when compared to pure PVDF polymer fibres. The piezo...

Polymer composites based on natural fillers are currently attracting great attention as alternative materials to glass or synthetic fibre reinforced plastics in several applications, mostly for automotive, appliance and packaging products. The main advantage of employing natural fibres is that these are biodegradable and renewable, and exhibit low cost, low density and high toughness. However t...

Fibre materials span a broad range of applications ranging from simple textile yarns to complex modern fibre-optic communication systems. Throughout their history, a key premise has remained essentially unchanged: fibres are static devices, incapable of controllably changing their properties over a wide range of frequencies. A number of approaches to realizing time-dependent variations in fibre...

This paper presents an overview of the research performed to date by a Swedish interdisciplinary team of scientists striving to develop multifunctional composite materials for storage of electric energy in mechanical load paths. To realise structural batteries from polymer composites, research pursued on carbon fibres for use as negative electrode in the battery as well as on polymer electrolyt...

Wet-spun polyacrylonitrile fibres are the main precursor for high strength carbon fibres. The properties of carbon fibres strongly depend on the structure of the precursor fibre. Polyacrylonitrile fibres were spun from solutions with varying solvent/nonsolvent content and different draw ratios. Wet-spinning is an immersion precipitation process, thus thermodynamic affinity of spinning dope to t...

Microstructured Polymer Optical Fibres [MPOF] were first made in 2001, and subsequent development has aimed at exploiting the material and design opportunities they present. Most effort has been focused on developing approaches for high bandwidth MPOF, and investigating the properties of multimode microstructured fibres. We also consider new applications in endoscopy and photonic interconnects,...

A Ni2+ based colorimetric probe based on glutathione-stabilized silver/copper nanoparticles (GSH-Ag-Cu alloy NPs) in an electrospun polymer matrix is reported. Glutathione-Ag-Cu alloy NPs were characterized by ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-vis), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The freshly synthesized GSH-Ag-Cu alloy NPs in a polymer matrix w...