Effect of particulate fillers on abrasive behavior of tungsten reinforced HDPE composites using grey based Taguchi approach

Abstract

Polymer matrix composites find a wide range of application in manufacturing sector owing to its superior mechanical, thermal and tribological properties. In polymer matrix generally thermosets are reinforced with fibers and thermo plastics are reinforced with particles comprising of ceramics and metal oxides. Volume of work done with thermo plastic polymers reinforced with pure metal are found to be less. In this work an attempt has been made to develop pure tungsten (W) reinforced High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) composites and study its tribological behavior using Taguchi based Grey Relational Analysis (GRA). To access the wear behavior of the composites two body abrasive wear test was conducted in Pin-on-disc apparatus with Filler content, Load and sliding distance as parameters and coefficient of friction (COF), specific wear rate (Ws) and hardness are considered as responses. Experiment designed based on Taguchi’s L16 orthogonal array was selected to optimize the number of experimental runs. The multi response wear behavior, Taguchi based Grey relational analysis was adopted to identify the optimum parameters and found Filler content with 7 wt% W at load of 20 N and sliding distance 75 m exhibited an optimum performance. Analysis of variance was done to identify the dominant factor that affected the wear and found Load as the dominant factor.