Leverage of Environmental Pollutant Crump Rubber on the Dry Sliding Wear Response of Epoxy Composites

Kiran Shahapurkar; Venkatesh Chenrayan; Manzoore Elahi M Soudagar; Irfan Anjum Badruddin; Pavan Shahapurkar; Ashraf Elfasakhany; M A Mujtaba; Md Irfanul Haque Siddiqui; Masood Ashraf Ali; Teuku Meurah Indra Mahlia

doi:10.3390/polym13172894

Leverage of Environmental Pollutant Crump Rubber on the Dry Sliding Wear Response of Epoxy Composites

Polymers (Basel). 2021 Aug 27;13(17):2894. doi: 10.3390/polym13172894.

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechanical, Chemical and Materials Engineering, Adama Science and Technology University, Adama 1888, Ethiopia.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Technology, Glocal University, Delhi-Yamunotri Marg, SH-57, Mirzapur Pole, Saharanpur District, Uttar Pradesh 247121, India.
³ Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, King Khalid University, Abha 61421, Saudi Arabia.
⁴ Applied and Theoretical Mechanics Laboratory, Discipline of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore 453552, India.
⁵ Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Taif University, P.O. Box 11099, Taif 21944, Saudi Arabia.
⁶ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur 50603, Malaysia.
⁷ Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh PIN 11451, Saudi Arabia.
⁸ Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al Kharj 16273, Saudi Arabia.
⁹ Centre for Green Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia.

Abstract

The effect of crump rubber on the dry sliding wear behavior of epoxy composites is investigated in the present study. Wear tests are carried out for three levels of crump rubber (10, 20, and 30 vol.%), normal applied load (30, 40, and 50 N), and sliding distance (1, 3, and 5 km). The wear behavior of crump rubber-epoxy composites is investigated against EN31 steel discs. The hybrid mathematical approach of Taguchi-coupled Grey Relational Analysis (GRA)-Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to examine the influence of crump rubber on the tribological response of composites. Mathematical and experimental results reveal that increasing crump rubber content reduces the wear rate of composites. Composites also show a significant decrease in specific wear values at higher applied loads. Furthermore, the coefficient of friction also shows a decreasing trend with an increase in crump rubber content, indicating the effectiveness of reinforcing crump rubber in a widely used epoxy matrix. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) results also reveal that the crump rubber content in the composite is a significant parameter to influence the wear characteristic. The post-test temperature of discs increases with an increase in the applied load, while decreasing with an increase in filler loading. Worn surfaces are analyzed using scanning electron microscopy to understand structure-property correlations. Finally, existing studies available in the literature are compared with the wear data of the present study in the form of a property map.

Keywords: crump rubber; environmental pollutant; polymer matrix composites; wear.

Grants and funding

R.G.P. 2/166/42/Deanship of Scientific Research at King Khalid University