Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

The most recent development of high performance fibers has led to the availability of composites which can compete and indeed replace metals. Just like any other engineering material GFRP’s have to be machined as well. Amongst the three machining operations of turning, milling and drilling, the latter is the most important. Drilling of GFRP is different from traditional metal machining because of the following concerns. In machining of GFRP the drill bit experiences variable thrust forces that produces excess vibration results in poor tool life. Apart from force fluctuations, cutting tools also experience severe abrasion on the flank surface, due to encounter with hard glass fiber. In this work, experiments were conducted in CNC milling machine for carbide drill bit based on L9 orthogonal array. The process parameters investigated are spindle speed, feed rate, and drill diameter. Fuzzy rule based model is developed to predict the thrust force in drilling GFRP. The results indicated that the model can be effectively used for predicting the response variable by means of which tool wear can be controlled.
Keywords: Drilling, Fuzzy Logic, GFRP Composites, Thrust Force, Toolwear