Study of drilling of composite material and aluminium stack

Drilling of CFRP/Al or CFRP/Ti, or AI/CFRP/Ti is a challenge to manufacturing engineers. Drilling of CFRP is manageable but the minute drill hits the Al or Ti, those hot and continuous chips destroy the hole. Few studies are carried out in this aspect; CFRP/Al is not reported till date. It is important to select right process parameters when drilling multimaterial stack since each material in the stack requires a different set of machining parameters. Hence, Drilling trials have been carried out in carbon-fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP)/aluminium (Grade 2024) stack without coolant, with plain carbide (K20) drills of various diameters to choose optimum process parameters. The parametric influences on thrust force, torque as well as surface finish were experimentally evaluated. The experimental results show that the quality of holes can be improved by proper selection of cutting parameters. This is substantiated by monitoring thrust force, torque, surface finish, circularity and hole diameter. For the CFRP, the circularity is found to be around 6 mu m at low feed rates, when the feed is increased the circularity increases to 25 mu m. The wear tests carried out show that, during first 30 holes, thrust force in CFRP undergoes a more important increase (90%) than thrust force of aluminium (6%). (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.