Experimental Investigations on Drilling Characteristics of Cenosphere Reinforced Epoxy Composites

In the present paper, the experimental investigations on drilling characteristics of cenosphere reinforced epoxy composites with cemented carbide drill have been presented. The drilling aspects such as thrust and hole surface roughness have been performed as function of four process parameters, namely, spindle speed, feed rate, drill diameter and % weight of the filler. Composite specimens were prepared with 20%, 40% and 60% by weight of cenosphere filler in epoxy resin as the matrix. The full factorial design (FFD) has been employed for conducting drilling experiments and the proposed drilling characteristics were analysed using response surface methodology (RSM) based quadratic models. The response surface analysis reveals that the addition of cenosphere as filler in epoxy resin appreciably decreases with the thrust and hole surface roughness for the developed composites.