OPTIMIZATION OF PROCESS PARAMETERS FOR SURFACE ROUGHNESS OF GFRP WITH AWJ MACHINING USING TAGUCHI AND GRA METHODS

For machining of composites like glass fibre reinforced polymers, abrasive water jet machining is generally used. In the present paper, an experimental investigation is described which is focused on studying the influence of AWJM process parameters on surface roughness of machined samples. Four process parameters namely water pressure, traverse speed, stand-off distance and abrasive mass flow rate are considered in the present study. Taguchi technique is used for the design of experiments and analysis of variance (ANOVA) is performed to determine the significance of parameters. It is found that water pressure and traverse speed are the major significant parameters for influencing surface roughness. Surface roughness decreases with increase in water pressure and decrease in traverse speed. For surface roughness minimization Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) technique is used for multi optimization of process parameters and experimental results are analyzed using Grey Relational Grades (GRG).