Optimization on the Dry Sliding Wear Behaviour of Mercerized Coconut Inflorescence Fibril Fortified Unsaturated Polyester Composites

The contemporary work emphasizes the importance of using coconut inflorescence fibril as a viable alternate to manmade fibril in polymer matrix composites for application components undergoing wear. The extracted inflorescence fibril from coconut tree is exposed to mercerization treatment with 5% wt/vol of aqueous solution. The composite samples were fabricated by varying the fibril content (10, 20, 30 and 40 wt %) of fibril/polyester matrix. The composite specimens were subjected to wear test employing a pin on disc tribometric setup under dry sliding state. Design of experiments inspired taguchi analysis is employed for wear analysis. The experiments were performed for 16 trial runs for the load (5, 10, 15, 20 N), sliding distance of (250, 500, 750 and 100 m) and sliding velocity of (6.3, 12.5, 19 and 25.3 m/s) as the operating parameters. The parametric analysis revealed fibril content is the more inducing parameter which have a notable impact on the wear behaviour of the composites ensued by sliding distance. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is adopted to forecast the dry sliding wear behaviour of the composites over a broad scope of test conditions. The extensive experimentation leads to the conclusion that fortification of inflorescence fibril to the polyester resin resulted in improvement of wear resistance up to optimum fibril content and then decrease in wear resistance was observed when the fibril content increases. Finally SEM analysis was performed on the wornout surfaces to study the governing mechanism such as ploughing, wedge formation and fibril pullouts.