Investigation of Tensile Behavior of Carbon Nanotube/Coir Fiber/Fly Ash Reinforced Epoxy Polymer Matrix Composite

Fiber-reinforced composite materials are lightweight and can withstand heavy loading conditions. Reinforcement augments the strength of the composite material, which is assessed by its elastic modulus. An attempt is made to reinforce epoxy with Coir Fiber, Carbon Nanotube (CNT) and Fly-ash. Central Composite Design (CCD), a Response Surface Methodology (RSM) tool, which is a Design of Experiment (DOE) technique, is used to fabricate the experimental samples to study their tensile behavior. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is employed to investigate the effect of reinforcement percentage of CNT, coir-fiber, and fly-ash on tensile behavior of composite. The ANOVA results follow the trend of the experimental values with a deviation of less than 10% in yield strength, tensile strength, and Young’s modulus. Two models (Artificial Neural Network and Multiple Linear Regression Model) originated resting on the regression equation to speculate the elastic modulus for various reinforcement parameters using the experimental data. The main objective is to optimize reinforcement parameters using both the models having a maximum elastic modulus of 2.602 GPa and 2.682 GPa, respectively, which is achieved by the teaching learning-based optimization technique. Furthermore, confirmation experiments validate the optimization process with an error of less than 4%.