Evaluation of drilling characteristics of high volume fraction fibre glass reinforced polymeric composite

This paper aims to understand the dynamics of drilling of high volume fraction glass fibre reinforced composite. This type of composite is currently used in ballistic applications. At high fibre volume, fibres do not show much relaxation and normal hole shrinkage associated with polymeric composites is not observed during drilling. Peak drilling thrust, dimension of holes drilled and vibration induced during drilling are observed to correlate with each other. Vibrations study has been attempted through wavelet packet transform and the results demonstrated its capability in signal characterisation. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.