The investigation of wear behaviour of glass fibre reinforced composite materials

Glass fiber reinforced polymer matrix composites have extensively been used in various fields such as aerospace, automobile, marine, and defense industries owing to their high strength, lightness and ease of fabrication. Epoxy resin as matrix are widely used in the production of glass fiber composites. In industrial applications, the increase in the use of composite materials means that it is necessary to know their behaviour under working conditions. Wear is an important parameter and its experimental behaviour must be known. In this study, the wear behaviour of glass fibre reinforced epoxy composites with reinforcements of woven roving and knitting glass fabric are experimentally investigated. Dry hand lay-up technique is employed to produce the composites. The procedure involves stacking the fabric one above the other with the resin mix evenly spread between the fabrics. The wear tests were performed by using a block on ring test method. Tests were performed for the speeds of 770 rpm at four different loads of 10, 20, 30 and 40N. Wear in the experiments was determined as weight losses. The weight losses were measured after sliding distances of 1, 2,3 and 4 km. The test is done on three repetitive samples and the average value is reported. From this investigation, it was found that the wear loss increases with the increasing applied load and sliding distances. Also, the woven roving glass fabric reinforced epoxy composite materilas showed higher wear resistance compared to the knitting glass fabric reinforced epoxy composite materilas.