Damage and dimensional precision on milling carbon fiber-reinforced plastics using design experiments

Milling composite materials is a rather complex task owing to its heterogeneity and the number of problems, such as surface delamination, that appear during the machining process, associated with the characteristics of the material and the cutting parameters. With the purpose of understanding and reducing these problems, this paper presents a study that evaluates the cutting parameters (cutting velocity and feed rate) under the surface roughness, and damage in milling laminate plates of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRPs). A plan of experiments, based on the Taguchi's method, was established considering milling with prefixed cutting parameters in an autoclave CFRP composite material. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to investigate the cutting characteristics of CFRP composite material using cemented carbide (K10) end mills. The objective was to establish a model using multiple regression analysis between cutting velocity and feed rate with the surface roughness and damage in a CFRP composite material. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.