Title: Mechanical and slurry abrasion behaviour of needle-punched nonwoven fabric reinforced epoxy composites

Authors: Prabina Kumar Patnaik; Sandhyarani Biswas

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela 769008, Odisha, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela 769008, Odisha, India

Abstract: In this study, composites are fabricated using polyester fibre-based needle-punched nonwoven fabric mat as a reinforcement material, with different area density and at constant fabric loading. Experiments are conducted to study the effect of area density of fabric mat on mechanical and physical behaviour such as tensile strength, flexural strength, inter-laminar shear strength and density. Similarly, wear behaviour is also studied using slurry abrasion test rig by considering different parameters like sliding speed, normal load, sliding distance, silica sand size and area density. Taguchi orthogonal array is adopted to analyse the wear characteristics. Further, steady state results indicated that the wear rate of the composites decreased with the increase in normal load whereas increased with the increase in sliding velocity. The comparative analysis showed that the mechanical and physical properties of composites improved significantly with the increase in area density of the fabric.

Keywords: needle-punched nonwoven fabric; area density; physical behaviour; mechanical behaviour; slurry abrasion; Taguchi orthogonal array.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMATEI.2016.084624

International Journal of Materials Engineering Innovation, 2016 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.200 - 218

Received: 11 Jul 2016
Accepted: 07 Nov 2016
Published online: 19 Jun 2017 *

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