Development of environment friendly electrical insulation from natural fibrils

Environment friendly electrical insulation material was developed using bio based rectangular cross sectioned sisal fibrils as reinforcement. High content cellulose base fibrils fibrillated by mechanical disintegration method into macro and micro fibrils from coarse sisal fibre. This fibrils were randomly distributed in polymer matrix. These composites were characterized in term of electrical, mechanical and thermal properties to investigate the stability for high strength electrical insulation materials. Excellent mechanical properties were observed. Tensile, flexural and impact strength of composites at 40 wt. % fibril loading improved by 151.34, 197.43 and 360.07 % as compared to unsaturated polyester resin. A few micro-mechanical models were compared with the experimental values. Nielson-Chen Model predicted the experimental data most accurately. The electrical properties of surface modified sisal fibril composites improved significantly in higher frequency. DSC analysis showed that the decomposition temperature of composite was higher, around 22°C than that of the polyester resin. Thermal degradation reduced and was observed in the range of 83-87% of fibril composites as compared to 97% of resin. Fibril composites are highly sensitive to electrical frequency and exhibit excellent electrical insulation property at 20 kHz. Alkali treated fibril based composites resulted an environment friendly thermally stable, high strength insulation material. Copyright © 2018 VBRI Press.