In the current scenario of climate change, the world is looking towards reducing its carbon footprint by focusing on sustainable materials. Living sustainably by reducing waste, recycling, reducing consumption and generally adopting a “greener lifestyle” are all important ways in which the planet’s population can reduce its impact on the environment. Reducing environmental impact is
also possible by changing government policies to promote the construction with environmentally benign structures using naturally available or bio-derived materials. Materials scientists are trying to introduce new concepts for modern built architectures implementing the next generation of materials, such as bio-derived polymers and bio-derived insulation materials. Research is also
underway to utilise agricultural wastes and co-products for value added products.

This present work focuses on reviewing various bio-derived materials for making sandwich panels using wood fibre mats, sheep’s wool fibres, mineral wool fibres as alternatives to polyurethane (PU) foams or paper honeycomb cores. Face sheets were made using natural fibre flax fabrics. In the initial trials, epoxy resin was used to bind the fibre reinforcements. The panels were produced by cold cure, and tested for their flexural performance. In a further experiment, the synthetic resin was replaced by bio-based epoxy resin (Super Sap CLR epoxy resin) and the performance of sandwich panels was evaluated.

Numerical models have been developed to study the flexural performance of these sandwich panels. Simulated results were then compared with the experimental data to check the variations in the model predictions.