Coir Fibre Reinforcement and Application in Polymer Composites: A Review

Increasing concern about global warming and depleting petroleum reserves have made scientists to focus more on the use of natural fibres such as bagasse, coir, sisal, jute etc. This has resulted in creation of more awareness about the use of natural fibres based materials mainly composites. In past decade there has been many efforts to develop composites to replace the petroleum and other non decaying materials based products.The abundant availability of natural fibre in Indiagives attention on the development of natural fibre composites primarily to explore value-added application avenues.Reinforcement with natural fibre in composites has recently gained attention due to low cost, easy availability, low density, acceptable specific properties, ease of separation, enhanced energy recovery, C02 neutrality, biodegradability and recyclable in nature. Agricultural wastes can be used to prepare fibre reinforced polymer composites for commercial use. Although glass and other synthetic fibre-reinforced plastics possess high specific strength, their fields of application are very limited because of their inherent higher cost of production. In this connection, an investigation has been carried out to make use of coir; a natural fibre abundantly available in India.This review discusses the use of coir fibre and its current status of research. Many references to the latest work on properties, processing and application have been cited in this review.