Mechanical and tribological characteristics of glass fiber and rice stubble-filled epoxy-LD sludge hybrid composites

In this work, bidirectional rice stubble fiber (RS), Glass fiber (GF), and Linz-Donawitz sludge (LDS) are used as reinforcement for the fabrication of epoxy (EP) based hybrid composite materials. The mechanical (tensile, flexural, compressive strength), and physical (density, void content) characteristics were evaluated as per ASTM standards. The tensile, compressive and flexural strength values of neat epoxy increased from 45 to 111 MPa, 22.5 to 58 MPa and 84 to 140 MPa respectively, with the addition of 6 % RS in EP-LDS-GF-RS composites. With the continuous addition of RS content, the density of the EP-LDS-GF composite gradually decreases, while void content increases gradually within 0.1 %, but both are higher than pure resin. Dry sliding wear tests are carried out on the composites to acquire the specific rate of wear (SW_rate). Taguchi’s design of experiment analysis is used to highlight the effect of various dependent parameters on SW_rate. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) tool is used to predict the combined effect of different input parameters on the SW_rate. From the SEM analysis, it is observed that material removal is significantly less near the region of filler content and hence the RS content is found to be the predominant control factor affecting the wear rate of the composites.