Abrasive wear behaviour of orange peel (biowaste) particulate reinforced polymer composites

The development of lightweight materials has drawn more attention in the last decade in the field of household, construction and automobile sectors in place of conventional materials. New environmental policies are forcing researchers to design and develop new lightweight materials that are environmentally friendly. The development of bio-composites in place of synthetic fibre composites is one of the solutions for this. This article deals with an experimental investigation of tribological properties of orange peel particulate (a biowaste) epoxy composites. The hand layup technique is used to fabricate the composite material by varying the filler loading from 0 to 30% with a variation of 10%. The abrasive wear behaviour of the fabricated composite was analysed by using a pin-on-disc set up under dry sliding conditions with varying loads at different sliding velocities. Based on the experiments, it is observed that the wear behaviour of neat epoxy material has enhanced significantly with the addition of the orange peel particulates as filler materials. The characterisation of orange peel particulates was done using energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The surface morphology study of the worn surface with respect to wear mechanism indicates plastic deformation and development of cracks at optimum filler concentration (20 wt%). With a higher filler concentration (30 wt%), brittle failure of the composite was noticed.