Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Nowadays, the Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) has replaced many of the mechanical components and this composite industry is experiencing significant growth. FRP’s also have replaced several traditional materials used in building, sporting equipment/appliances, automotive/aircraft parts, boat and canoe hulls, and bodies for recreational vehicles. The composites in general, offer many advantages over traditional materials: important among these are high strength to weight ratio, light weight, flexible design, parts consolidation, dimensional stability, corrosion resistance and low tooling costs. Since the composites are anisotropic in nature, machining them is a complex process especially with reference to drilling and milling. Therefore, during the dry drilling operation on composites, drilling induced damage drastically affects the performance of the drill tool. So, the present investigation is an attempt to study the effect of the drill process parameters like the spindle speed (1000, 1200 and 1500 rpm), the feed rate (0.1, 0.2 and 0.3 mm/rev), the drill diameter (6, 8 and 10mm) and fiber orientation (Random, Random+Stitched and Random+Rowings) on the tool wear of the HSS drill bits in dry drilling of glass fiber reinforced polyester composites. The experimental runs of the set process parameters were determined using Taguchi’s experimental design technique. Orthogonal arrays of Taguchi, the Signal-to-Noise (S/N) ratio, and the Analysis Of VAriance (ANOVA) are employed to find the optimal process parameter levels to minimize the tool wear and to analyze the contribution of each of these process parameters on tool wear.