Study of Alkali Treatment and Its Influence on Characteristics of Borassus Palm Fiber

Palmyra fibers are found to be the renewable and sustainable fiber in textile applications. These fibers possess good tensile strength and found to be used as a natural reinforcement material for composites. The main objective of this work is to extract and treat the fibers with varying concentrations of NaOH (2%,3%,4%& 5%) to evaluate the mechanical properties, surface morphology, and fiber orientation. The observations in SEM images denote the removal of impurities like hemi cellulose and lignin after the alkali treatment. 4% NaOH-treated fibers results in higher tensile strength (63.43 MPa) and a further increase in alkali concentration to 5% results in a reduction of the tensile strength (62.65 MPa). For all the treated fibers, elongation at break was found to be higher than the untreated one. The orientation in the fiber structure improves after the alkali treatment up to 4% and a further increase in alkali concentration leads to a decrease in the orientation which was observed through X-ray diffraction studies.