OPTIMIZATION OF TENSILE AND FLEXURAL MODULUS OF SILICA GEL REINFORCED ALUMINIUM MMC BY USING TAGUCHI METHOD

Abstract

In the last two decades, the requirement of manufacturing industries for light weight machines and machine parts are growing. Aluminium Metal Composites (AMCs) have unique feature high strength to weight ratio. It’s hardness and mechanical properties make it versatile in various type of application like in engine assembly, aeronautics and other types of engineering application. In an aviation industry, aluminium composite having advantage of light weight and high mechanical properties like hardness, tensile strength, flexural strength etc, are used for body, propeller and other part of plane. In this present analysis, aluminium composite was fabricated with six different percentage of filler silica gel. The tensile and flexural moduli are calculated at three different speeds to examine the mechanical properties of composite. The results were computed by help of L18 orthogonal array. On the basis of Taguchi’s method, the plan of experiment was executed to perform test by taking two design factors, speed and percentage of filler. Using Taguchi optimization method, optimum combination of these two factors was found. Tensile modulus and flexural modulus were analyzed on ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance) and generate regression equation. To analyze tensile modulus and flexural modulus ‘Larger is Better’ was taken. In this analysis, it is observed that percentage of filler content is most dominating factor which affecting tensile modulus and flexural modulus. At last, the experimental results were validated by the confirmation tests.