Practical: Determining the Tensile Strength of Plant Fibres
- The tensile strength of a fibre refers to the maximum load it can carry before breaking
- For example, this information would be important when determining the strength of a rope made of plant fibres
Apparatus
- Plant fibres
- Retort stand (clamp stand)
- Clamp
- Weights
Method
- The fibre should be attached to a clamp stand
- Attach a weight on the other end of the plant fibre
- Carefully continue to add one weight at a time until the fibre breaks
- Record the mass at which the fibre broke
- This represents the tensile strength
- To increase the accuracy of your results, this process should be repeated with more samples of the same plant fibre
- These values can be used to calculate the mean tensile strength for the fibre
- It is important to ensure that the fibres are all of the same length and that all other variables are kept constant
Apparatus used to determine the tensile strength of plant fibres
