Delamination Analysis in Drilling of Composite Materials Using Digital Image Processing, Regression Modeling and Fuzzy Logic

Glass Fiber Reinforced Plastic composites have an increased application in recent days, due to its enhanced structural, mechanical and thermal properties. The heterogeneous nature of this kind of materials makes complications during machining operations. Drilling of holes in GFRP becomes almost unavoidable in fabrication. However, drilling is a common machining practice for assembly of components. The quality of holes produced in the GFRP material is severely affected by surface roughness, Circularity, Delamination, Cylindricity etc. The objective of this study is to apply full factorial design for experimentation and fuzzy logic model prediction to achieve an improved hole quality considering minimum delamination through proper selection of drilling parameters. Calculating the damage area has always been a challenge with conventional methods. An attempt is made with Digital Image Processing (DIP) using Image J software to find the damage area. KeywordsGFRP, Fuzzy logic, Full Factorial Design, Drilling, Delamination, Digital Image Processing.