Study on the Machinability of Natural Fiber-based Hybrid Composite with Nanofiller Incorporation

Abstract

In many industrial applications, natural fiber reinforced composites are emerging as a competitive substitute of composites based on synthetic fibers due to their numerous advantages. However, real world applications of such composites require some secondary operations in order to complete the assembly of the components or parts. This work focuses on preparing hybrid composite made of glass and jute fiber along with epoxy composites incorporated with nanofiller and investigating the machinability of those composites. Hand lay-up technique was used to prepare the composites with five layers of fibers. Three types of nanoparticle such as Al2O3, ZnO, and TiO2 of 3 wt.% were incorporated into the composites. Machinability was assessed considering the delamination factor and surface roughness. Analytical studies of machinability were conducted using minitab software. The findings show that the addition of nanofillers considerably increases the machining performance of the composite material. Comparing among three different nanofillers it was found that the composite contains the ZnO nanoparticle provided the significant improvement with least overall surface roughness and moderate delamination. On the contrary, TiO2 incorporated composite material showed least delamination.