Environmental Effects on Tribological Behavior of Composite Materials

In recent years, developments in industrial applications has led to the demand for materials with better properties. Composite materials provide these requirements due to their high mechanical properties. Especially in the last half century, the production of composite materials used in industrial areas such as space, marine, aeronautics has increased to a great extent. This increase has led scientists to work on composite materials. One of these work areas is tribological behaviour. It is inevitable that the wear of the composite materials occur due to surface roughness of the parts in contact with each other; therefore they may not fulfill the functions expected from them. It is important to determine how tribological behavior of composites used in almost all areas of the industry will be present in working conditions. In this study, wear and frictional characteristics of carbon fiber reinforced epoxy composites subjected to different environmental effects (soil, water, solar) were investigated under dry contact condition at different operating parameters. Vacuum Assisted Resin Infusion Technique (VDRIT) was used for the production of composite materials. Environmental effects, exposure times and applied loads on the friction coefficients and wear amounts were investigated. Wear tests were carried out under three different loads of 10 N, 20 N, 30 N, sliding distance of 2000 m and at a speed of 0.2 m/s. Wear rate in the experiments was calculated as weight loss. The tests were carried out on three samples for each loads and their average values were taken. Similar to the results found in the literature, when carbon fiber reinforced composite materials were exposed to different environmental effects, the friction coefficients decreased and the wear rate increased. The use of information and data obtained with this study will guide material selection of machine tools manufactured from composite materials in different environmental conditions.