INVESTIGATION OF MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF MANGO STARCH BIOCOMPOSITE DERIVATIVES

Abstract

Petroleum based Plastic and polymer has become a basic part of our lives, finding application in almost every aspect of human endeavour. This excessive dependence has resulted to land and marine pollution and caused environment degradation due to non-biodegradability properties. While recent attempt has focused on bioplastic as alternative route to resolve these environmental challenges. Even with biodegradability as an advantage, the limitation associated with bioplastic is usually poor mechanical and physical properties. In order to improve mechanical properties and processability usually the bioplastics are blended with other additives (composite, plasticiser, and fillers). This research investigates the mechanical properties (Stress, Strain, Percentage Elongation and Young Modulus) of biocomposite made from waste mango starch, blended with carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as composite, hydrolysed with dilute HCl acid at variable concentration, and plasticised with sucrose at variable percentage amount. It was observed that increasing the concentration of HCl result to significant decrease in the Young Modulus of the biocomposite, while increasing the amount of plasticizer (sucrose) result to significant increase of the Young modulus of the biocomposite derivatives, and the same was observed when percentage amount of carboxymethyl cellulose was increased. The result shows a biocomposite (SB2) with Young modulus of 5657.73 MPa which is significantly higher than that of most fossil based plastic, which implies that bioplastic can be blended with composite to produce materials that have comparable mechanical properties  or even better than fossil based plastics. The result was analysed statistically using Analysis of variance (ANOVA), performed at 96 % confidence interval to find the significant difference. KEYWORDS: Young modulus, biocomposite, Mango Starch, plasticiser, biodegradability, bioplastic