Study of Tribological Behavior of ABS/ CaCO3 Composite Using Grey Relational Analysis

The tribological properties of acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) polymer filled with micron-sized calcium carbonate (CaCO3) are studied in this paper. Filler content, normal load and sliding speed are considered as design parameters and coefficient of friction (COF) and specific wear rate are considered as the responses. The experiments are conducted on multi-tribotester (block-on-roller configuration) based on L27 orthogonal array (OA). The optimum design parameter combination for minimum coefficient of friction and specific wear rate are found using grey relational analysis. The optimum parameter combination is found to be 5% of filler content, 35 N of load and 120 rpm of speed. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is also used to find out the most influential factor which affects the tribological properties. The most influential factor is normal load followed by sliding speed and filler content. Further, a confirmation test is carried out to validate the result and it is seen that the grey relational grade is increased about 72.56% from the initial to the optimum condition. Finally, surface morphology is studied using scanning electron microscopy (SEM).