Drilling of Glass Fiber-Reinforced Epoxy Laminates with Natural Fillers: Thrust Force Analysis

Abstract

An investigation has been carried out to study the effect of spindle speed and feed rate on thrust force generated in drilling glass fiber-reinforced plastics with natural fillers. An effort has been made to use abundantly available natural fibers, namely coconut coir, rice husk, and wheat husk as fillers along with synthetic glass fibers. The drilling experiments have been extensively conducted at six different levels of feed rate and spindle speed using carbide twist drills of 4 mm. Predictive model has been developed using Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to predict the thrust force with material, spindle speed, and feed rate being the input parameters and thrust force being the output parameter. The results of the predictive model are in close agreement with the actual values. Coefficient of correlation between predicted and experimental values for training and testing data sets is 0.995 and 0.9849, respectively. The mean percentage error in training and testing is found to be 3.175 % and 5.31 %.