Influence of dolomite on mechanical, physical and erosive wear properties of natural-synthetic fiber reinforced epoxy composites

Abstract

The study was intended to investigate the influence of dolomite content on the physical, mechanical and erosive wear properties of hybrid natural—synthetic fiber reinforced polymer composites. Therefore, epoxy composites, having fixed amount of Grewia optiva and glass fiber with varying proportion of dolomite particles (0, 5, 10 and 15 wt%) were developed with hand-layout technique. The results show that the density, void content, impact energy and hardness increases, while flexural and tensile strength decreases with the increase of dolomite content. For erosive wear analysis, Taguchi method with L16 orthogonal array was used. The experiments were performed on an air jet machine with different impingement angles (30, 45, 60 and 90°), erodent sizes (100, 150, 200 and 250 μm) and impact velocities (10, 20, 30 and 40 m s−1). The lowest wear rate was achieved under optimal condition of 10 wt% dolomite content, 30° impingement angle, 10 m s−1 impact velocity and 150 μm erodent size. Moreover, scanning electron microscopy was implemented in order to analyze the eroded composite surfaces for possible wear mechanism.