Optimization of Wear Behaviour of Sugarcane Bagasse-Based Epoxy Particulate Composite Using Taguchi Method and Grey Relational Analysis

Abstract

The evolving world of composite materials needs to adopt cheap and easily available green material as the reinforcement. In this study, sugarcane bagasse is used as the reinforcement in the epoxy matrix. This study is based on the analysis of wear behaviour of sugarcane bagasse epoxy composite for varying sliding speed, sliding time and applied load. Epoxy composite reinforced with sugarcane bagasse is made up by hand lay-up process using epoxy, hardener and sugarcane bagasse in powdered form. This material is subjected to the wear testing on pin on disc wear testing machine under dry conditions. A plan of experiment was made ready by using Taguchi L9 orthogonal array to find out the wear behaviour in form of wear and frictional force in a controlled manner. In this study, analysis of variance is used to find out the correlation of process parameters with applied load, sliding distance and sliding time of epoxy composite. It was observed that the varying applied load, sliding time and sliding speed relatively affect the wear property of epoxy composite. The optimal combination of process parameters resulted in minimum dry sliding wear.