This project conducts a study on wear performance and frictional behaviour of selected metals against stainless steel counterface under dry contact condition. The chosen materials for conducting this study are mild steel, copper and aluminium. The parameters used for inspection and analysis of this project are applied load (0-90N) and sliding distance (0-14 km). Block on ring machine was used to conduct the adhesive wear testings. The worn surfaces are examined and wear mechanisms are categorized using scanning electron microscopy. The results reveal that copper shows better wear properties and aluminium shows less friction. Mild steel exhibits a high rate of wear and material removal. All three materials revealed three different wear mechanisms; aluminium (abrasive and adhesive), mild steel (abrasive and ploughing), copper (adhesive).

In this study, hand lay-up technique was used to fabricate epoxy composite based on jute fibre mates. Three different orientations wew considered in the fabrication of the composites. The characteristics of the material removal from the surface of the composite due to sliding condition was investigated. Different applied loads were considered to gain different shear force in the interface. Scanning electron microscopy was used to examine the influence of the shear force on the interaction between the fibre and the resin after sliding at different orientations. The outcome would be significantly contributed to the knowledge of composite science and tribology. The main findings of the work was that fibre orientation has very significant influence of the wear and frictional performance of jute fibre reinforced epoxy composites. Sliding distance controls the running in and steady state wear behaviour of the composites especially when the composite was tested in parallel and antiparallel orientations. Wear resistance of the composites found to be better in the antiparallel orientation followed by parallel and then normal. Jute fibres gave very promising results to replace glass fibres for the same composites at the same operating conditions.

Interfacial adhesion of kenaf fibres in epoxy composites was investigated using single fibre pull-out test. Several aged kenaf fibres were tested in this work. Two types of kenaf fibres were used in the work, those treated with 6% NaOH and those untreated kenaf fibres. Kenaf fibres were aged in engine oil, water, salt water, and diesel. The pull-out tests were performed using microtensile tests. The tests were performed at 1 mm/min loading rate. Scanning electron microscopy was used to observe the damage on the fibres and the effect of the treatment. The general results revealed that aging of the fibres reduced their strength and interfacial adhesion. Salt water showed the least effect on the strength of the fibres. At most cases, the breakage in the fibres is the main failure. In other words, there is no remarkable effect of aging on the interfacial adhesion since the most impact was on the structure of the fibres.

The development of recycled, renewable and sustainable products to replace fossil products is a vital concern from industrial, environmental and academic viewpoints. Lubricants are one of the synthetic products widely used in numerous fields of the manufacturing and industrial sectors. Furthermore in 2005, more than 38 million metric tons of oils were used in the lubrication techniques of various industrial applications in the United States (US). In other words, the need for alternative friendly lubricants needs to increase by about 36 billion gallons to meet expected demands in 2022. This need motivates the current investigation of the potential use of waste cooking oil as a lubricant for tribological applications. A review of the available literature reviewed no work related to this topic. However, many works have been conducted on vegetable oils and their potential as lubricant. The current study establishes the basis for the research in the area of waste cooking oil as a lubricant; focusing on the oil and its blend characteristics and applications in journal bearings. At the first stage of this study, comprehensive experiments were conducted on the wear and the frictional behaviour of brass, aluminium and mild steel metals sliding against a stainless steel counterface under dry contact condition for comparison purposes with the lubricant results. Furthermore, predicting the tribological performance of materials is a very complex task and many attempts to model the wear and frictional behaviour of materials have failed. In this study, the artificial neural networks approach is used as a tool to predict wear, roughness, interface temperature and the frictional behaviour of metals under different operating parameters. For the wear experiments under dry contact conditions, the wear and frictional performance of brass, aluminium and mild steel metals was investigated at different operating parameters: sliding distances (0 – 10.8 km) and applied loads (0 – 50 N) against a stainless steel counterface at a sliding velocity of 2.8 m/s. Experiments were performed using a block-on-ring (BOR) machine. To categorise the wear mechanism and damage features on the worn surfaces and the collected debris, scanning electron microscopy was used. A thermal imager was used to measure the interface temperature between the contacted bodies. The results of the dry tests revealed that the operating parameters significantly influence the wear and frictional behaviour of all the metals. Brass metal exhibited better wear and frictional behaviour compared to the other metals tested. This is mainly due to the presence of 4% of Pb which helped reduce the aggressiveness of the material removal. Three different wear mechanisms were observed: two-body abrasion (brass), three-body abrasion (mild steel) and adhesive (aluminium). Friction coefficient trends were almost steady for brass and mild steel, however, aluminium/stainless steel exhibited slight fluctuations due to the modifications of the worn surface due to the sliding. A biolubricant extracted from waste cooking oil (WCO) was developed in this study. Different blends of lubricant were prepared: fully synthetic 100%SO, 75%SO+25%WCO, 50%SO+50%WCO 25%SO+75%WCO and 100%WCO. The prepared waste cooking oil was blended with 5% (wt) of EVA copolymer and 2% (wt) of EC and synthetic oils. Viscosity, pour point and flash points of the blends were examined and compared with industrial lubricants, (10W-50, 15W-40, 5W-40, and 5W-30). ISSN(Online) : 2319-8753 ISSN (Print) : 2347-6710 International Journal of Innovative Research in Science, Engineering and Technology (An ISO 3297: 2007 Certified Organization) Website: www.ijirset.com Vol. 6, Issue 2, February 2017 Copyright to IJIRSET DOI:10.15680/IJIRSET.2017.0602001 1402 The possibility of using WCO with its blend as a lubricant was tested using two techniques. First, a new tribology machine was designed and fabricated locally to study the wear and frictional performance of brass, aluminium and mild steel under lubricant conditions considering different sliding distances (up to 10.8 km), applied loads (10 N – 40 N) and sliding speed of 2.8 m/s at different lubricant temperatures (22C, 40C, 80C). For consistent comparison purposes with the dry data, 113 kPa applied pressure was used as the dry contact condition was conducted mainly on 50N applied load which is equivalent to 113 kPa. This study found promising potential for the use of WCO as a lubricant from a viscosity viewpoint. The viscosity of the waste cooking oil was significantly enhanced with the addition of 5% (wt) of EVA copolymer and 2% (wt) of EC. Blending the waste cooking oil with the fully synthetic oil also showed good improvement in performance. Based on the viscosity data, it is found that the pure waste cooking oil is very comparable with W5-30 oil which is recommended for gasoline and diesel engines. Increasing the applied load reduced the specific wear rate due to the presence of the lubricant which assisted to absorb the heat in the interface and clear (polish) the rubbed surfaces. The lubricant temperature was the key in determining the wear behaviour of the materials. Increasing the temperature reduced the viscosity, leading to less lifting during the experiments (i.e. a high specific wear rate). Conversely, the lubricant temperature showed no remarkable influence on the frictional behaviour. This is mainly due to the chemical adsorption of the fatty acids on the worn surfaces which acted as coated layer. From the journal bearing testing results, the waste cooking oil and its blends exhibited a similar trend in oil pressure values to the ones obtained for the fully synthetic oil, thus demonstrating the potential of waste cooking oil and its blends for journal bearing applications. The complexity of predicting the wear and frictional performance of the materials motivates the tribologist to adopt an artificial neural network (ANN) approach, as it can be used to make such predictions with caution. In developing an ANN for this study, training function, performance and adopting functions were found to be the keys to predicting wear, roughness and interface temperature. The large input data of the friction coefficient (12009 x 3 x 3) made the prediction of friction coefficient difficult and led to poor ANN performance. Using individual inputs for each parameter and training the ANN in several steps improved the performance. About 95.5% prediction performance was recorded, particularly for the wear, roughness and interface temperature.

Using natural fibres in civil engineering is the aim of many industrial and academics sectors to overcome the impact of synthetic fibres on environments. One of the potential applications of natural fibres composites is to be implemented in insulation components. Thermal behaviour of polymer composites based on natural fibres is recent ongoing research. In this article, thermal characteristics of sisal fibre reinforced epoxy composites are evaluated for treated and untreated fibres considering different volume fractions of 0–30%. The results revealed that the increase in the fibre volume fraction increased the insulation performance of the composites for both treated and untreated fibres. More than 200% insulation rate was achieved at the volume fraction of 20% of treated sisal fibres. Untreated fibres showed about 400% insulation rate; however, it is not recommended to use untreated fibres from mechanical point of view. The results indicated that there is potential of using the developed composites for insulation purposes.

Combustion process of conventional liquid fuels and BioFuels depend on many factors including thermo - physicochemical properties associated with such fuels, their chemical structure and the combustion infrastructure used. This manuscript summarises the computational results of a steady cfd simulation for reactive flows performed to validate advanced reaction mechanisms for both conventional and BioFuels. The computational results have shown good agreement with the available experimental data with the differences thoroughly discussed and explained. An important observations and findings reported in this work was that when comprehensive reaction models were used, the injected fuels burned at a slower rate compared to the situation when reduced models were employed. While such comprehensive models predicted better flame structure and far better biproducts compared to the existing experimental results, it has also led to over-predicting the temperature field. The computational results have also shown that BioDiesel produces a marginally higher rate of CO2 compared to Diesel. Such results are thought to be due to the Oxygenated nature of the fuel and how such feature influences the development of a comprehensive reaction mechanism for such fuels.

Numerical studies based on steady Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for reactive flows were performed with the objective of validating advanced reaction mechanisms used to study spray combustion for both conventional and Biofuels.The SST-4 equation model was used to model turbulence, while more than one (comprehensive) reaction mechanisms were used to model the combustion of methanol, diesel and biodiesel using CHEMKIN-CFD and Fluent CFD code.Some of the reaction mechanisms used in modelling the current reactive flow simulation was already tested while others were developed during the course of this work.The computational results have shown good agreement with the available experimental data of Widmann and Presser (Combustion and Flame, 129, 47-86, 2002) with the developed reaction mechanism slightly over predicting the temperature range.The CFD results have also shown that most of the harmful emission of the combustion of liquid fuels is less for Biodiesel compared to conventional diesel with the exception of CO 2 .This is in line with the finding of many experimental data.