Optimisation of mechanical properties of wood dust-reinforced epoxy composite using grey relational analysis

Abstract

In the present era of product development, composites are being used because of the ease in manufacturing and low weight to volume ratio. The increasing awareness towards environmental issues and requirement of more versatile polymer-based materials has led to higher interest in natural fibre/filler composites. In this paper, epoxy composite with six different filler contents (wt%) of sundi wood dust are tested at three different speeds. Tensile and flexural tests are performed according to ASTM standard. Different design parameters i.e., filler content (wt%) and speed for load, tensile stress and flexural stress values are optimised using grey relational analysis (GRA). Entropy method determines the corresponding weights to each criterion. A grey relational grade (GRG) has shown the improved performance parameter, and the best performance is observed at 10% filler content with speed of 1 mm/min.