Paper Title
BURDEN TURNS INTO BENEFIT: POTENTIALITY OF MACADAMIA NUTSHELLS FOR ENGINEERED POLYMER COMPOSITES

Abstract
Abstract - Global production of macadamia nuts has increased in the monoculture farming environments producing a massive amount of nutshells which mostly remains as leftover and burden for the industry, andare eventually challenging to dump. Macadamia nutshellsare hard, tough, and comparable to aluminium. In developing engineered composite materials for various purposes such as light duty, structural and semi-structural, it is often essential to harden the materials by natural fillers or fibres. Macadamia nutshellsare by nature hard and tough. Hence, it is very interesting to choose macadamia nutshells as fillers given that other manufacturing conditions are economic. It is the time to understand macadamia nutshells from the perspective of a component of natural fibre/filler composites in the global urgency of coming back to natural fillers in composite manufacturingand switching from synthetics. Minimizing the use of synthetics is now a worldwide voice. Relevant findings need to be reviewed and disseminated to thoroughly understand overall achievements and knowledge gaps. A summary of current research on macadamia nutshells and their bio-synthetic polymer composites along with their prospective scopes will be presented here. Keywords - Macadamia, Nutshells, Composites, Fillers, Properties, Applications.