Investigation on Wear and Friction Characteristics of Bi-Directional Silk Fiber Reinforced Nanoclay Added HDPE Composites

Abstract

In the present day context ,the requirement of specific material properties cannot be met with the use of conventional metals and alloys.Therefore, the development of composite materials is gaining prominence.The readiness of composites for a specific purpose has been one of their greater advantages and more perplexing good challenges to adopt them as alternative materials to replace the existing ones.The polymer composites possessing low density, high strength to weight ratio, have the advantages of having low friction and good wear resistance property. Keeping this in mind, the naturally available silk fiber as reinforcement in HDPE matrix along with nano filler addition has been adopted in this work from the point of improving friction and wear resistance. In this study, the slide wear characteristics and the coefficient of friction of HDPE (high density polyethylene) containing bi-directional silk fiber (SF) composites at two levels of nanoclay (0.5 and 1.%NC) are experimentally investigated using pin on disc setup for three sliding distance. It is observed from slide wear data that increasing the sliding distance, the weight loss increases for pure HDPE, pure HDPE+SF, pure HDPE+SF+0.5%NC and pure HDPE+SF +1%NC of the load application of 10N,20N,30N respectively. Also among four samples studied, the pure HDPE+SF +1%NC shows the least weight loss and pure HDPE shows highest. As regards the coefficient of friction varies in the range of 0.12 to 0.37 for all the three sliding distances and load application 10N, 20N and 30N respectively. This work brings out the importance of nano-clay addition to silk fiber based HDPE composites shows the excellent wear resistance. Further the worn surface damage features have been examined and analyzed using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and it is noticed the wear data gets credence from the SEM photographs, thus complimenting each other.