Experimental and analytical investigation of drilling in high performance hybrid composites

Hybrid composites produced by the addition of metal alloys to carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRP) have superior mechanical and physical properties, excellent specific strength and high resistance to corrosion. The most commonly used machining processes in the use of hybrid materials in industry is the drilling process. After the drilling processes, due to the anisotropic properties of the CFRP material, delamination, uncut fiber and fiber pullout are observed. For this reason, the performance of CFRP after drilling operation must be the main concern. Therefore, in this study, hybrid materials were tested on factors such as stack order, drilling speed and feed rate which should be applied in hole drilling process and analysis were made on various results. The tests were performed with three-factor and three-level L9 Taguchi orthogonal experiment design due to minimize the cost and material. As a result of this study, the best stack order and drilling parameters of the hybrid composite materials was determined with many variables such as force and torque values, the required energy, surface roughness values and delamination factors.