Bast fibers are promising natural materials known for their biodegradability, affordability, and eco-friendliness, making them an alternative to synthetic options. Extensive research has been conducted to examine the effects of integrating various bast fiber reinforcements into epoxy and polystyrene matrices to boost the properties of the composite materials. However, there is limited research on ensete fiber and its utilization as a reinforcement that needs more in-depth research to be used as an alternative bast fiber. This paper aimed to predict and compare the performance of ensete fiber composites with six other bast fiber-reinforced polystyrene and epoxy composites. In this study, flax, hemp, jute, ramie, banana and kenaf were selected bast fibers for comparison purposes. This article employed various micromechanics models and finite element method (FEM), varying the fiber volume fraction. Our findings revealed that hemp fiber-reinforced composites exhibited the best predicted elastic properties, while banana fiber-reinforced composites showed the weakest performance. Notably, composites made with ensete fibers outperformed those made with jute and banana fibers in both epoxy and polystyrene matrices. Comparisons were made between results from the micromechanics models and FEM for all bast fiber-reinforced epoxy and polystyrene composites and there was an agreement between the effective elastic properties and fiber volume fraction (FVF). Further, bast-fiber reinforced epoxy composites showed higher values than polystyrene for strain analysis while for stress analysis, polystyrene composites showed higher stress loads than epoxy composites.

The permanence and durability of mechanical and structural elements with discontinuities such as cracks and voids require the calculation of SIF (stress intensity factors) with reasonable fidelity. SIF is a crucial parameter that predicts crack growth and failure behavior by quantifying the stress field neighboring the crack tip. Therefore, understanding the sophisticated characteristics of the stress fields in the vicinity of discontinuity requires an effective way of calculating SIFs. Currently, there are numerous methods to calculate SIF, such as FVM (Finite Volume Method), FEM (Finite Element Method), BEM (Boundary Element Method), XFEM (Extended Finite Element Method), Phase field method and Meshfree methods. For an extended period, FEM is one of the leading methods in solving fracture mechanics problems. Though FEM is quite robust in dealing with several engineering problems, it has got its inherent drawbacks to deal with singular fields like discontinuities. Hence to reasonably capture moving discontinuities, finer meshes near the discontinuous field are required that demand more computation effort and time. To alleviate the above drawback of FEM, this study employed Extended Isogeometric Analysis (XIGA) to efficiently and effectively determine the SIFs in the case of fissured plates as benchmarking fissure problems. In this study SIFs in relation to crack length were examined for edge and center cracked plates and results were compared with the theoretical values.