Drilling Unidirectional Glass Fiber-Reinforced Composite Materials at High Speed

Drilling is one of the most important cutting operations which are currently carried out on fiber reinforced composites. Increasing cutting speed will reduce machining time and hence improve productivity. Therefore, it is of interest to study the effects of increasing cutting speed on drilling characteristics of fiber-reinforced composite materials. In this paper, the effects of increasing cutting speed ranging from 9550 up to 38650 rpm, (from 210 to 850 m/min.) on average thrust force, torque, tool wear and hole quality are studied for glass fiber-reinforced composite materials using both multifaceted drill and twist drill. These cutting speeds are much higher than those found in other literatures. It is shown that tool wear will be a main problem to be overcome for high speed drilling of glass-fiber reinforced material.