Full Paper - EFFECT OF DRILLING PARAMETERS ON SURFACE QUALITY OF NATURAL FIBER REINFORCED POLYMER COMPOSITES

Composite materials are widely recognized for their increasing applications in the area of space, aircraft, automotive and other engineering sectors. This is due to their superior characteristics such as light weight, recyclability, low materials cost and production cost, high specific strength and modulus. Drilling operations are required to facilitate assembly of the component to get final product. A hole drilled in composite material comes up with poor surface roughness, delamination and debonding of fibers with the matrix material. The present work deals with fabrication of jute and human hair based series of composites reinforced with Epoxy resin. Experiments were conducted using the samples prepared from the samples prepared from the fabricated material to study the effect of human hair in jute fiber reinforced composites. The interfacial properties and internal structure of the fractured surfaces were analyzed using Scanning Electron Microscopy. Taguchi's L9 orthogonal design was used to optimize the drilling parameters with respect to the surface roughness of the prepared composite material. Experimental results have shown significant increase in the properties of the composite materials. It has been found that the drill point angle is most contributing factor affecting the characteristics of the drilled holes. SEM images have revealed that debonding of fibers with matrix results in decrease in the strength by 18.75% and 6.25% in Human hair and jute fiber reinforced composites respectively thus leading to the poor surface roughness.