Application of Taguchi and GSA for Drilling of CFRC Composite Materials

The composites are gaining significant position among various materials nowadays due to their unique features and properties. This Technological development in the materials sector has created interest among engineers and scientists to create new materials with different features and required properties. Among the various new developed materials, Carbon Fibre Reinforced Carbon (CFRC) composite material is occupying important place. This composite material is used mostly in the manufacturing of advanced structures like rockets, space shuttles, missiles, aircrafts etc. Generally these composites are very costly in nature and the addition of drilling cost of these materials makes them more costly. Hence the machining parameters are carefully selected, so that no drilling damage is caused during machining. The main objective of this paper is to find the optimal drilling parameters by using Taguchi method and the unique Grey Relational Analysis technique. The drilling experiments were carried out on a RCC composite plate with High speed steel tool on the VMC100 computer numerically controlled drilling machine, at the workshop of Anna university campus, Chennai, India.