Experimental investigation of delamination of carbon and glass fiber during abrasive water jet machining

Abstract

Composite materials are inevitable in today’s industrial world because of its unique characteristics such as all good mechanical properties, electrical resistance, and light weight ratio compared to conventional materials. The applications of composites are being widely increasing in exponential form like aerospace, sports, defence etc.., machining operation is a necessary in manufacturing industry like drilling, boring, slotting, threading, riveting and screwing etc…, we considered drilling is a most necessary and critical task on composite laminates and it is big issue over conventional material. In this project, abrasive water jet machine is used for drilling on carbon and glass fibres. The aim of present experimental work is investigating influence of process parameters and minimizes the delamination damages because delamination is the significant damage concerned while machining, this experimental work is concerned with various process parameters such as Abrasives flow rate, Standoff distance, traverse speed, and Water Pressure. MINITAB software was used for design of experiments (DOE) for AWJM by combination of various process parameters with multiple levels. Taguchi’s L16 orthogonal array (4x4) was used to conduct experimental work on AWJM and digital scanner was used to determine influence of process parameters. It is revealed that water pressure and traverse speed are the major influencing of significant process parameters. Damage free holes and less delamination factor was obtained while increase in water pressure and decrease in traverse speed. AWJM showed prominent technique for both carbon fiber and glass fiber, which experimentation results revealed that the value of 1.013 mm for carbon fiber and 1.015 mm for glass fibber are obtained at the combination of abrasives flow rate, standoff distance, water pressure and traverse speed upon responded variables are 800 gr/min, 4 mm, 50 mm/min, and 3000 bar, respectively.