The effect of hexagonal boron nitride on wear resistance under two and three-body abrasion modes of polyetherketone composites

This investigation was performed to study the effect of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) on abrasion wear behaviour of polyetherketone (PEK) composites. PEK composite were examined for two-body abrasive wear (2-BAW) with silicon carbide abrasive paper and three-body abrasive wear (3-BAW) test with silica sand according to ASTM standards. The Taguchi L9 design of experiment was employed to optimize the wear operating parameters. The optimized conditions with 10 N load, 320 grit size and 10 wt% of hBN resulted minimum specific wear rate (K-s). Unfilled PEK portrayed better impact strength, hardness, lower density and lower K-s under 3-BAW. However, 10 wt% of hBN was beneficial under 2-BAW condition. The SEM micrographs were analyzed to probe the wear mechanism involved in the abrasion process. Surface roughness (R-a) value measured was compared with Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and it was found that both the values are in good agreement. Multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis (MOORA) was implemented to rank the overall performance of PEK composites under study.