Development and Study of Tribological Properties of Biocomposite for Brake Pad Application

Pollution is the adverse effect humanity has to suffer due to the technological advancement. Being engineers our objective is to design the machine elements based on sustainable, eco-friendly concepts. Due to wear in brake pad, abrasive particles come to environment. So the material selection of brake pad is an important criterion. In a braking system brake pad comes in contact with the disc and due to heavy friction the kinetic energy of the vehicle reduces and it comes to rest. Generally in this process a lot of wear occurs in brake pad and the abrasive particles comes out of the brake pad. In the brake pad composites asbestos has been used as reinforcement for a very long period of time. Few years before it was found that asbestos particles having carcinogenic effect on the skin. So a lot of research is going on for finding a suitable replacement for asbestos. The objective of this research is to find the suitability of using natural fiber composite material as a replacement for asbestos. Hemp fiber is chosen in the place of asbestos which comes from the stem of the hemp tree. It is a natural fiber having very high young's modulus and cellulose content. Cashew friction dust is chosen to improve frictional properties, graphite powder is used as solid lubricant and epoxy is used as matrix material for the brake pad composite. The composites with varying compositions were being fabricated using compression molding machine using an acrylic die followed by post curing in a furnace. Then few important properties like wear rate, coefficient of friction, density and hardness were evaluated. Pin on Disc investigation is performed on the composites for analyzing the wear rate and frictional behavior of composites. Finally the results were compared with that of the existing literature.