Glass fiber reinforced epoxy resin composites are widely used in the manufacturing of printed circuit boards. Drilling is used to provide the holes for the electronic components to be placed on printed circuit board surfaces. Drilling of these composite materials is different from metallic materials due to surface delamination and surface roughness of drilled holes. The objective of the present work is to optimize process parameters namely cutting speed, feed rate, drill diameter and thickness of workpiece in drilling of glass fiber reinforced epoxy resin composites. The experiments were designed by using Taguchi’s L27 orthogonal array with factor 4 and 3 level. Analysis of variance test was conducted to determine the significance of each quality characteristic on drilling. The results indicate that feed rate is the most influential factor on the delamination followed by cutting speed, drill diameter and thickness of workpiece, and for surface roughness the most influential factor is feed rate followed by drill diameter, thickness of workpiece and cutting speed. This work is useful in determining optimum values of process parameters to minimize delamination and surface roughness in drilling of glass fiber reinforced epoxy resin composites.

Keywords : Taguchi Method; Optimization; Drilling; L27 Orthogonal Array.