International Journal of Engineering and Technology

According to the literature survey, tremendous number of works can be found in discussing the crushing behaviour of hybrid composite/metal tubes. Most of them dealt with the synthetic fibres but not many reports on the utilizations of natural fibres. Therefore, this paper presents the axial crushing behaviour of steel/kenaf hybrid cylindrical tubes under compressive force. The kenaf yarn fibres were firstly wetted with a polymeric resin and it was then wound around the steel tubes. The tube diameter was kept constant 50 mm in diameter and fibre orientations were varied. The steel/kenaf hybrid tubes are aligned vertically and compressed quasi-statically. The force-displacement curves were recorded automatically and crashworthiness parameters were determined and related with the hybridization parameters. It was found that the present of kenaf yarn fibre around the steel tubes capable to slightly enhance the crushing performances. During progressive collapses, fibre splaying mode was observed with large composite wall fragmentations.