Investigation on the tensile strength of epoxy (wt 75%) reinforced with stranded mat glass fibre (wt 25%) and unreinforced epoxy - A novel approach) and unreinforced epoxy - A novel approach

This study is aimed towards investigating and com-paring the tensile strength of plain epoxy and epoxy (wt. 75%) reinforced with stranded mat glass fibre (wt 25
^%
). Epoxy based composites under study were prepared by hand lay up technique. The tensile specimens were prepared as per ASTM standard and tested in universal testing machines. 20 samples per group were prepared for the study. From the tensile strength testing results epoxy (75 wt%) reinforced with glass fibre (25 wt%) exhibits an average of 28.702 MPa, whereas plain epoxy exhibits an average 13.927 MPa. Based on the investigation done by T-test statistical analysis, it is found that there is a significant (P.!0.5) difference in the variance of tensile characteristics between epoxy (75 wt%) reinforced with glass fibre (25 wt%) and plain epoxy that is with a significance value of 0.01. With the limitation of this investigation, it is inferred that the epoxy (75 wt%) reinforced with glass fibre (25 wt%) has good tensile strength when compared to plain epoxy.