Investigation on the solid particle erosion performance of some glass and polymeric transparetn materials

In this thesis, the solid particle erosion behavior of transparent materials such as monolayered polycarbonate solid sheet, plexiglass and laminated glasses which are widely used in automotive, aerospace and construction industries have been investigated experimentally.. The experimental studies have been carried out in three steps. In the first step, the experiments carried out at a constant erodent impact velocity of 150 m/s and at different impingement angles of 20°, 30°, 45°, 60° and 90°. In the second phase, the erosion losses of the same transparent materials were determined at a constant impingement angle of 90° under different impact velocities of 75, 150 and 195 m/s. As a result of these, it was observed that polyvinyl butyral which is used as an intermediate layer material in laminated glass, significantly prevented the progression of erosion wear. Glass is the most brittle among the tested materials, but exhibited as semi-ductile characteristics against alumina (Al2O3) abrasive particles of nominal 52 µm size which were used in the experiments. Polycarbonate solid sheet which is also used as canopy material in air vehicled have showed the highest erosion resistance performance among the tested materials. The highest amount of erosion losses of polycarbonate materials occurred at low impingement angles. Plexiglass materials exhibited ductile behavior and the highest amount of erosion occurred at low impact angles. At the final step, polycarbonate material was subjected to erosion tests with relatively bigger sized silica (SiC) sand and it was found that erosion loss increased with increasing abrasive particle size. Key Words: Solid particle erosion, Polycarbonate solid sheet, Laminated glass, Plexiglass, Polyvinyl butyral (PVB)