Development of sustainable abrasive wear resistant waste rubber crumb reinforced polymer matrix composites

Abstract

The current work involves the development of polymer matrix composites (PMC) filled with rubber crumb (RC) for tribological applications. The novelty of the proposed composite lies in harnessing of waste rubber crumb into useful filler material in polymer matrix composites for tribological applications owing to compliant nature of rubber. The proposed composites with different filler weight percentage have been developed and subjected to three body abrasion at different control factors (filler weight percentage, load and time). For the abrasion investigation, three body abrasive test rig was used, and Taguchi’s orthogonal arrays were used in the design of trials. The Taguchi technique was used to find the best parameter settings for minimizing specific wear rate. The effect of input factors (filler weight percentage, load and time) on abrasion resistance of proposed composites was evaluated, and statistically analysed using ANOVA. The effect of addition of RC on mechanism of abrasion was also studied. RC greatly improves the abrasion resistance of the suggested composites, according to the findings. The abrasion mechanisms involved are also studied. The results reveal that the composite with 20 wt% filler, subjected to three body wear at 30 N load for 10 min results in minimal specific wear of 0.31 × 10⁻¹² m³/Nm which is approximately 15.5 times higher than the combination (A2B1C2) that exhibits least resistance to wear/higher specific wear rate.