EVALUATION OF SURFACE ROUGHNESS PARAMETERS (Ra, Rz) IN DRILLING OF MDF COMPOSITE PANEL USING BOX-BEHNKEN EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN (BBD)

Medium Density fiberboard (MDF) panels are economic alternative to engineering materials because of their superior advantages in furniture industry. The degree of surface roughness of the MDF panel plays an important role, since any surface irregularities will reduce the final quality of the product. Design of experiments has been used to study the effects of the drilling parameters such as speed, feedrate, and drill diameter (input data's) used on the prediction of surface roughness (output response) on drilling MDF composite. The present work describes the development of mathematical models to predict the two surface roughness parameters namely average roughness(Ra),and mean peak to valley height (Rz) which were used to determine quantative surface characteristics of the panels. Experiments were performed under different drilling conditions of spindle speed, feed rate and drill diameter.