Mechanical and thermal behavior of hybrid composite medium density fiberboard reinforced with phenol formaldehyde.

The world was in demand of wood products mainly for interior design, furniture making and household utilizes and at the same time agricultural residue usage was increased for making Engineering woods. Coconut is an abundant crop in Asia and coir fiber was extracted from coconut husk, as by-products. MDF was one of the by-products produced from coir reinforced with resin. In this work, the coconut coir was used to produce hybrid MDF with basalt fiber and phenol-formaldehyde resin hybridization. The panel was prepared with different coir and basalt fiber combinations by keeping a fixed resin percentage. The coir and basalt fiber percentage ranges from 40 to 75 % and 5-40 % respectively. SEM studied the morphological characteristic of the panel whereas thermal stability of the panel was evaluated through Thermo-gravimetric Analysis. The fire resistance was observed through a flammability test. The physical properties and mechanical properties were evaluated by ASTM Standards. From the investigations, the MoR and MoE have a higher value for Panel 3 with 29.14 N/mm and 3143 N/mm respectively and the internal bonding strength shows of 2.1 N/mm maximum values of mechanical properties. The result shows for panel 3 has 15 % and 18 % more strength for MoE and MoR respectively and IB also shows 35 % of increased value.