Study of mechanical and abrasive wear behavior of glass fibre reinforced epoxy-talc/mustard cake hybrid compositions

In this work, the influence of inorganic/organic-inorganic filler on mechanical and sand abrasion wear behavior of glass fiber reinforced epoxy composites was investigated. An inorganic filler such as talc and organic filler like mustard cake with 0wt%, 5wt%, 10wt%, and 15wt% were loaded in glass epoxy composites by hand lay-up technique. The mechanical properties such as tensile strength, impact energy, and hardness was carried out on the fabricated specimens. It was found that the incorporation of talc/talc-mustard cake filler content to the glass fiber reinforced composites leads to decrease the tensile strength beyond the 10wt% and impact energy beyond 5wt%, on the other hand, it increases the hardness of the composites. Furthermore, this paper report the synergistic effect of talc-mustard cake filler on abrasion wear behavior of glass fiber reinforced composites by using Taguchi L 16 orthogonal array technique. The result showed that abrasion wear resistance increase with increases the talc/talc-mustard cake content in composites. Normal load, talc/talc-mustard cake content, and abrading distance showed a decreasing order of significance. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the contribution (%) of selected control factor on wear behavior of composites. Afterword, the wear mechanism of worn surface was examined by SEM (scanning electron microscopy) to correlate the experimental result and shows higher wear occur at unfilled glass epoxy composites compared to talc/talc-mustard cake filled glass-epoxy composites.