Taguchi approach for characterization of three-body abrasive wear of carbon-epoxy composite with and without SiC filler

Fiber-matrix interfacial bonding plays a critical role in controlling performance properties of polymer composites. Carbon fibers have major constraints of chemical inertness with the matrix and need the surface treatment to improve the adhesion with the matrix. In this work, parametric appraisal of three-body abrasive wear behavior was presented for silane treated carbon fabric reinforced epoxy (C-E) composites with and without silane treated silicon carbide (SiC) as filler. The fiber content was fixed at 60 wt.%, while the weight fraction of SiC was varied (5 and 10 wt.%) to obtain three different compositions. Three-body abrasive wear tests were conducted using design of experiments approach based on Taguchi's orthogonal arrays. The findings of experiments indicate that the wear loss is greatly influenced by load and grain size of abrasive. An optimal parameter combination was determined, which leads to maximization of abrasion resistance. Inclusion of SiC filler reasonably increased the abrasion resistance of C-E composite. Analysis of variance results showed that the load significantly influenced the abrasion of SiC filled C-E composites. Efforts were also made to correlate the abrasive wear performance of SiC filled C-E composites using artificial neural network (ANN). The wear behavior of composite by ANN prediction closely matched the experimental results and finally, optimal wear settings for minimum wear were identified.