PENGARUH WAKTU CURING TERHADAP KEKUATAN TARIK PADA MATERIAL UNSATURATED POLYESTER RESIN YANG DIPERKUAT SERAT PISANG

Abstract

The curing on composite is able to change the mechanical characteristic of the material. This experiment is aimed to analyze the influence of curing to tensile strenght of the specimen at 80C with various curing holding time. Besides, this experiment will also analyze the influence of fiber mass fraction variation to tensile strenght where the fiber mass fraction taken to this experiment are 9, 27, and 81 sheet of fiber and they are placed on the composite testing specimen using continuous fiber composite type.. After the specimen banana fiber reinforced unsaturated polyester resin is formed, then heat treatment is done until the glass temperature transition (Tg) from polyester in 80C for 60, 90, 120, and 240 minutes and then the strength is tested in tensile test. The result is compare with the specimen tensile strenght without heat treatment. So the influence of curing duration will be known. From the result of tensile test, can be concluded that curing is able to improve the material tensile strenght. The improvement caused by the temperature increase until Tg,make the molecules in composite move continuously and rearrange resin molecules, so hole used to be on the surface and inside the composite will decrease a little and after cooling the molecules move slower. Besides, this process can add the amount of cross-linking on composite, so there will be the improvement on the mechanical characteristic. From this experiment, it can be concluded that the best tensile strenght improvement and the improvement reached is 24,125% on the 90 minutes heat treatment. Keywords: curing, curing duration, fiber mass faction, continuous fiber composite, hole, and cross-linking.