Solid Particle Erosion of Particulate Filled Short Glass Fiber Reinforced Polyester Resin Composites

Abstract

Fiber reinforced composite materials have been used in main parts of structures; an accurate evaluation of their erosion behavior becomes very important. In this study, short glass fibre reinforced polyester based isotropic polymer composites are fabricated with five different fibre weight-fractions. The effect of various operational variables, material parameters and their interactive influences on erosive wear behavior of these composites has been studied systematically. After systematic analysis of solid particle erosion for all the five composites, 30wt% short glass fiber reinforced polyester based composite shows better erosion resistance. In order to improve the erosion resistance further ceramic silicon carbide particle is reinforced with the 30wt% glass-polyester based hybrid composites. A finite element (FE) model (LS-DYNA) of erosive wear is established for damage assessment and validated by a well designed set of experiments. For this, the design of experiments approach using Taguchi’s orthogonal arrays design is used. It is recognized that there is a good agreement between the computational and experimental results, and that the proposed simulation method is very useful for the evaluation of damage mechanisms.