Effects of sea water aging and cold treatment on properties and three-body abrasion behaviour of FRP composites: Regression analysis,ANOVA and GRA embedded VIKOR multi-response optimization

Abstract

This paper accentuates fabrication of different types of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites reinforced with glass fibres (GF), carbon fibres (CF) and aramid fibres (AF) individually, and some were also hybridized with GF-CF, CF-AF and AF-GF, respectively. All the composites were heat treated (HT), a part of which were sea water aged and cold treated (SWACT) at specific conditions to study the effects of sea water aging and cold treatment on their physical and mechanical properties. Among all, CFRP possessed the best combination of properties even after the SWACT process. Three-body abrasion wear behaviour of the SWACT CFRP composite was then studied and post-abrasion surface morphology was investigated, followed by regression analysis and ANOVA. Finally, the wear responses, that is, abrasion wear rate (AWR) and specific wear rate (SWR) were optimized simultaneously using GRA embedded VIKOR method. Results revealed that 109.86 m of sliding distance (L _s ), 19.62 N of load (W) and 60 rpm of wheel speed (N) was the optimal coalescence of parameters for the minimal responses, considered simultaneously. At the optimal parametric setting, improvements of AWR and SWR were 69% and 238% respectively, revealing effectiveness of the process adopted for the multi-response optimization.