The growing demand in the consumer market for products with sustainable technologies has motivated new applications using overmolded natural fiber composites. Therefore, studies have been conducted mainly to understand the adhesive properties of overmolded parts. In the present study, a polypropylene (PP) composite with 30% coconut fibers without additives was developed with the aid of a corotating twin screw extruder. Subsequently, a multicomponent injection mold was developed based on the geometry of the ISO 527 type I specimen, in which samples overmolded with PP and PP–coconut-fiber composite, with the overlap in the central area, were obtained to evaluate the adhesive strength of dissimilar materials. The objective of this study was to evaluate the bond between PP and PP–coconut-fiber composite under different processing conditions using an adhesive strength testing device to perform a pure shear analysis. The experimental conditions followed a statistical design considering four factors in two levels and a significance level of 5%. The results indicated that adhesive strength increased significantly as the overlap area increased. It was observed that temperature and injection flow rate were the factors that most contributed to strengthening the bonds of dissimilar materials.

The increase in the technical and functional requirements of plastic items has led the development of multimaterials. To achieve a good performance in the adhesion of dissimilar materials, in this case, polypropylene and coconut fiber composites, it is fundamental to understand the phenomena related to the specific interface. This work aims to evaluate the adhesion force of different multi-materials, namely between overmolded polymer-coconut composites using the digital image correlation (DIC) technique. First, coconut fiber composites were prepared using three different coupling agents, then they were overmolded with polypropylene. The results show that coupling agents have a positive influence increasing the mechanical properties of such multi-materials under tensile stress. The Lagrange vectors obtained by DIC analysis identified higher stress concentration at the joint edges, where the occurrence of surface cracks led the samples to fail in the region close to the overlap.

Structural studies of three vegetable fibers plus eucalypt wood through heating microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and thermal analysis through Thermal Gravimetric Analysis/Differential Thermal Analysis are presented in this work. Morphological and dimensional changes obtained from heating microscopy were observed, showing shrinkage occurrences of vegetable fibers related to their diameter and length, respectively. The thickness decreased by 50% when heated at 450–500°C, this process starting at 300–400°C with an initial percentage length of ≈ 90%, that corresponds to a fast weight loss. These results were compared with simultaneous thermal analysis under the same conditions. Thus, for the first time, it was possible to quantify vegetable fiber dimensional changes and surface aspects under heating that cannot be seen by traditional thermal analysis. We also performed crystallinity calculations from XRD data, observing that cellulose/hemicellulose contents had major contribution in all samples.