%0 Journal Article %A Jain, Kunj %A Kumar, B. Santosh %A Gopalan, Venkatachalam %A Vimalanand, S. %A Ayyappan, S. %D 2018 %I Begell House %K hybrid composites, vibration, curved beams, polymer matrix %N 3 %P 269-282 %R 10.1615/CompMechComputApplIntJ.2018020127 %T VIBRATIONAL ANALYSIS OF HYBRID FABRIC-REINFORCED POLYMER MATRIX CURVED COMPOSITE BEAMS %U https://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/36ff4a142dec9609,2890239e4262b8d7,0151a85e3af89ab1.html %V 9 %X Composites are the future for materials and structures. These materials are light and have a high strength-to-weight ratio. In this paper, curved beams with hybrid fabrics (combination of natural fabrics, namely, jute, sisal, and hemp with a synthetic one, namely, glass fabrics) as reinforcements and synthetic resins (namely, vinyl ester, epoxy, and general purpose (GP) resin) as the matrix are fabricated. Glass fiber is chosen to provide additional stiffness to the composite as natural fibers are known to have lower mechanical properties than those of glass or carbon fiber. This gives it a hybrid nature of natural and synthetic fibers. Thus, this study aims at finding an optimum combination of the said fibers and at their modal analysis to find their relative stiffness. Taguchi L9 orthogonal array is used for the design of experiments with a type of natural fabrics, percentage of natural fabrics in hybrid fabrics, and a type of synthetic resin as parameters. Vibration tests are carried out to find the natural frequencies of the fabricated samples using a curved clamp and the Dewetron 7.11 software to get experimental results. The Analysis of Variation (ANOVA) technique is employed to find the level of influence of the type of natural fabrics, percentage of natural fabrics in hybrid fabrics, and the type of synthetic resin on the natural frequencies using the Minitab software to find the regression equations. Comparisons are also made between experimental results and regression model where the error percentage is found out. %8 2018-05-18