SLIDING FRICTION WEAR BEHAVIOUR OF SEASHELL PARTICULATE REINFORCED POLYMER MATRIX COMPOSITE – MODELING AND OPTIMIZATION THROUGH RSM AND GREY WOLF OPTIMIZER

In this work, the friction wear behaviour of seashell particles reinforced in thermoplastic polymer Nylon-6 is investigated.. Seashells were collected from the seashores, uniform size 75 µm is obtained using mechanical ball milling and vibrating sieve. Various proportions of seashells such as 12, 15 and 18% by weight are added to nylon-6 and the polymer composites wear performance in dry sliding is studied as per ASTM G99 standard, loss of material in wear, friction coefficient and interface temperature are optimized. For experiment design Response surface methodology (RSM) based Box-Behnken method (BBD) is adopted and multi-objective analysis is performed using desirability analysis. Observation shows that interface temperature is highly influenced by rotational speed (41.61%), % reinforcement of seashells influences the wear loss significantly (35.71%) and coefficient of friction is influenced greatly by rotational speed (41.48%)and % reinforcement of seashells (18.18%). A novel metaheuristic algorithm Grey wolf optimizer is used for constrained optimization, which shows that for 0.3 CoF and 25°C interface temperature as constraint wear loss is 35.77 microns for % reinforcement of seashell as 3.59, whereas for 0.3 CoF and 30°C interface temperature wear loss is 28.99 microns for a seashell reinforcement of 18%.