Assessment of the Exit Defects in Carbon Fibre-Reinforced Plastic Plates Caused by Drilling

This paper investigates the formation of the exit defects in carbon fibre-reinforced plates and characterizes their features in terms of drilling conditions. It was found that spalling and fuzzing are the major mechanisms of exit defects. The spalling, consisting of a main region and a secondary region, is caused by chisel and cutting edge actions, in which the former plays a key role. The fuzzing, however, exists in the cutting region where the included angle between the fibre direction of the surface layer and that of the cutting speed is acute. A severer spalling damage corresponds to a high spindle speed, a large feed rate and a great thrust force. Some empirical relationships, including a dimensionless formula, were developed for assessing the characteristic dimension of the spalling damage based on the known drilling conditions.