High-Speed Drilling of Woven GFRP Composites: Optimization of Machining Parameters

In today’s modern manufacturing, high-speed machining is a crucial technique to ensure a high production rate and greater accuracy, which leads to lower manufacturing costs. Fiber reinforced composites (FRC) is preferred to drill at lower cutting speeds since drilling is a difficult process for it. High-speed drilling (HSD) in FRC, however, hasn't been exhaustively investigated. Accordingly, the present study demonstrates an experimental analysis of a full factorial design (FFD) performed on woven glass fiber-reinforced composites (W-GFRP) using a K20 carbide drill by varying the HSD process parameters such as cutting speed (CS), feed rate (FR), and drill point angle (PA) to evaluate optimum cutting conditions. Here, response parameters like Thrust force (TF) and torque, were determined and statistical analysis was performed using Analysis of variance (ANOVA) for TF, torque, and their percentage involvement. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) was utilized to determine and suggest the most favorable drilling conditions for minimum TF and torque (using MATLAB R2019a).