Drilling of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) Composites: Multi Response Optimization Using Grey Relation Analysis with Taguchi’s Method

Abstract

Nowadays, GFRP (Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer) composites are widely used in manufacturing industries specially aircraft, aerospace, and automobile industries due to their excellent mechanical and thermal properties such as more specific strength, better specific modulus of elasticity, high damping factor or damping capacity, better resistance to corrosion, effective fatigue resistance, low thermal expansion coefficient. Hence, it is necessary to understand the machinability behavior of these composites. Drilling is widely used to assemble the components in aforementioned industries. But machining of these composites is dissimilar to conventional metals due to their isotropic nature and in-homogeneity. Major drawbacks of these composites in machining are fiber pull out, delaminating and burring of fibers. So, appropriate selection of process parameters is an important concern in machining of GFRP composites. This work mainly focuses on assessing the effects of process parameters i.e. spindle speed, feed and drill diameter on thrust, torque, delamination factor (both at entry and exit) in drilling of GFRP composites using TiAlN coated drill bit. The study also utilizes the Grey methodology coupled with Taguchi L16 OA to determine the optimal parametric combination.