Sustainable sandwich plates: investigating the dynamic and tensile properties of jute fibre-reinforced face layers with TiO2-infused tea waste epoxy cores

This study presents an experimental and numerical investigation of the dynamic behaviour of sandwich plate consists of  jute fibre-reinforced face layers and TiO₂-incorporated tea waste epoxy core layers. The core layers are reinforced with varying amounts of weight percentages of TiO₂ nanofiller (0%, 1%, 1.5% and 2%) to assess their impact on the tensile strength and free vibration responses. Tensile properties are evaluated using uniaxial tensile tests according to the ASTM D 3039 standard. The natural frequencies of the sandwich plates are obtained experimentally through experimental modal analysis using a fast fourier transform (FFT) analyser with PULSE Lab software (Bruel & Kjaer). These experimental findings are validated against numerical results obtained from the finite element software ABAQUS, where material properties are derived from the tensile tests are used as inputs. Additionally, numerical simulations are conducted to explore the effects of varying boundary conditions, aspect ratios, core thicknesses, face l ayer thickness ratios, and ply orientations (symmetric and antisymmetric) on the dynamic behaviour of the sandwich plates. Comparison with published literature confirms the accuracy and reliability of the proposed sandwich structures. The results provide insights into optimizing the dynamic performance of jute fibre-reinforced composite structures with sustainable tea waste-based epoxy cores for lightweight engineering applications. The optimum performance was observed at 2 wt% TiO₂ loading, which showed the best compromise between improved tensile strength and enhanced vibration damping without agglomeration effects seen at higher concentrations.