Investigation of specific energy absorption of natural fiber honeycomb sandwich structure composite as building construction material application

The usage of incorporating natural fibre in composite material has seen some potential to be used as a future building construction material due to its recyclability, lightweight and high-reliability feature. However, the issue of implementing natural fibre as building construction material in composites material concerns the structural integrity of the material. As the characteristics of the natural fibre honeycomb composite have been discovered more in terms of properties which ranges from its physical and chemical structural composition to the quasi-static impact collapse of the material, the absorption energy of the material in different cell geometry is unknown. Therefore, the purpose of this study involves the testing of the natural fibre honeycomb (NFH) composite made from cement fibre (face sheet) and corn starch (core) with regards to its crushing behaviour when subjected to flatwise compression load according to ASTM D-3410 standard to analyse the performance of energy absorption of NFH composite with different thicknesses of the hexagonal core and cell wall thickness to determine the Specific Energy Absorption of the material. The result obtained shows that the increasing thicknesses of the core and cell wall improves the ability of the composite to absorb more energy and the specific energy absorption is higher when both factors are increased.