Investigation on Mechanical and Sliding Wear Behavior of Pongamia-Oil-Cake/Basalt Fiber-Reinforced Epoxy Hybrid Composites

Environmental concerns are increasing day by day with the use of petroleum-based products for making polymer composites. The dire need for biodegradable and inexpensive materials has drawn the attention toward green materials extracted from sustainable sources such as plants. Keeping pace with current needs, this work is focused on development of Pongamia-oil-cake (POC)-reinforced basalt/epoxy composites. The hybrid composites with varying POC content (3% and 6%) were fabricated using vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding method. The mechanical properties such as Shore D hardness, impact strength and tensile properties were studied by conducting tests in accordance with ASTM D2240, ASTM D-256A and ASTM D638 standards. The tribological behavior of composites was studied by conducting sliding wear test as per ASTM G99 standard for varying sliding velocities. For all tests, the hybrid composite with 6% POC content showed the highest values such as hardness of 86 Shore D, impact strength of 475 kJ/m, tensile strength of 350 MPa and elastic modulus of 1.52 GPa. For improvement in the hardness and strength, the main contributing factors were uniform dispersion of POC particles and better load transfer between POC particles and epoxy matrix. The wear studies showed an increase in specific wear rate as the sliding velocity was increased but for compositions the one with the highest POC content lowers specific wear rates values.