OPTIMIZATION OF DRILLING PROCESS PARAMETERS VIA TAGUCHI, TOPSIS AND RSA TECHNIQUES

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) is the most preferred composite material due to its high strength, high modulus, corrosion resistance and rigidity and which has wide applications in aerospace engineering, automobile sector, sports instrumentation, light trucks, airframes. This paper is an attempt to carry out drilling experiments as per Taguchi's L-27 (3(13)) orthogonal array on CFRP under dry condition with three different drill bit type (HSS, TiAlN and TiN). In this research work Response Surface Analysis (RSA) is used to correlate the effect of process parameters (cutting speed and feed rate) on thrust force, torque, vibration and surface roughness. This paper also focuses on determining the optimum combination of input process parameter and the drill bit type that produces quality holes in CFRP composite laminate using Multi-objective Taguchi technique and TOPSIS. The percentage of contribution, influence of process parameters and adequacy of the second order regression model is carried out by analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results of experimental investigation demonstrates that feed rate is the pre-dominate factor which affects the response variables.