The use of natural fiber-reinforced polymer composites has increased over a period of time, majorly due to the ecosustainability and biodegradability of the composites. Among several grades of natural fibers, bamboo fibers offer numerous environmental and cost benefits and possess excellent mechanical characteristics. The superior properties of the bamboo fibers have triggered the research interests in the domain of bamboo fiber-reinforced polymer composites. Among the polymers, polyesters are long chain molecules made up of atoms arranged in various ways with other elements to form the basic building blocks of a polymeric chain. Polyester is being increasingly employed in today’s industrial products due to its inherent advantages. As a result, based on the potential properties of bamboo fibers as reinforcing materials and polyester resin as matrix material, the biocomposites are synthesized by hand lay-up technique and the specimens cut as per the standard dimensions and subjected to mechanical investigations, vibration, and morphological characterization as per the ASTM test methods. The increase in fiber weight content has enhanced flexural, tensile, and impact characteristics and improved the damping characteristics of the composite specimens. The microstructural evaluations have revealed the uniform distribution of the bamboo fibers in the resin, and the morphological studies of the fractured specimens have revealed that the fracture is majorly due to the matrix cracks rather than the fiber debonding, which is a major attribute ascertaining the strong coherent strengthening mechanism brought about by the inclusion of bamboo fiber in the polyester resin.

Engineering applications including food processing, wastewater treatment, home heating, commercial heating, and institutional heating successfully use unglazed transpired solar collectors (UTCs). Trapping of solar energy is the prime goal of developing an unglazed transpired solar collector. The UTC is usually developed in and around the walls of the building and absorbs the solar energy to heat the air. One of the key challenges faced by the UTC designer is the prediction of performance and its warranty under uncertain operating conditions of flow variables. Some of the flow features are the velocity distribution, plate temperature, exit temperature and perforation location. The objective of the present study was to establish correlations among these flow features and demonstrate a method of predicting the performance of the UTC. Hence, a correlation matrix was generated from the dataset prepared after solving the airflow over a perforated flat UTC. Further, both strong and weak correlations of flow features were captured through Pearson’s correlation coefficient. A comparison between the outcomes from a linear regression model and that of computational simulation was showcased. The performance probability for the UTC was interlinked with correlation matrix data. The Monte Carlo simulation was used to predict the performance from random values of the flow parameters. The study showed that the difference between the free stream value of temperature and the value of temperature inside the UTC’s chamber varied between 15 and 20 °C. The probability of achieving system efficiency greater than 35% was 55.2%. This has raised the hope of recommending the UTC for drying and heating where the required temperature differential is within 20 °C.

The adhesive bonding method is commonly used in various industries to join different materials because of its benefits, which include a high strength-to-weight ratio, low cost, and high efficiency properties. Automotive, aerospace, marine, and construction industries are increasingly using adhesively bonded joints because the hand layup techniques involve simpler fabrication methodologies, maintenance procedures, and controllable stress distribution parameters in the overlap region, which ultimately lead to easier production of automobile, aircraft, and ship components. The objective of the present work is primarily to assess the overlap length in conjunction with the adhesive strength of glass-epoxy adherends bonded with epoxy resin. In this article, the experiments are performed on single lap-bonded joints. The parameters considered for the current work involve the length of overlap, which is maintained at 15, 25, and 35 mm, and adhesive bonding thickness that is maintained at 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5 mm, respectively. The strength of the adhesively bonded lap joint is determined using a Universal Testing Machine (Lloyd Instruments Ltd., West Sussex, United Kingdom) with a 1–20 kN capacity. The investigational outcome reveals that, as the overlap length of the adhesively bonded single lap joint increases, a substantial increase in the joint strength is observed; additionally, it is noted that, with the increase in adhesive thickness, the joint strength decreases. It was observed that the artificial neural network–predicted values from the analysis were extremely close to the experimental values, and the difference between the experimental and predicted values was very small.