Mechanical and wear behaviour of boron carbide fillers reinforced Lapox L-12 epoxy composites.

To keep up with the growing demand for composites in fields like medicine, transportation, safety, and athletics, researchers constantly create new composites. These experiments examined the impact of boron carbide filler particles in epoxy by making composites out of Lapox L-12 epoxy with 5, 10, and 15 percent boron carbide fillers using the hand layup technique. The mechanical properties of the prepared composites were measured as per ASTM standards, including hardness, ultimate tensile strength, yield strength, elongation, and flexural strength. Further, wear behavior of prepared composites was evaluated as ASTM G99 standard with varying loads and speeds. Hardness, tensile and flexural strength were increased with a slight decrease in percentage elongation after boron carbide filler particles were added to epoxy Lapox L-12. Lapox L-12 with boron carbide fillers reinforced composites were shown an improvement of 56.4% in hardness, 52.5% in ultimate strength and 25.85% improvements in the flexural strength. The wear behaviour of epoxy and its composites were affected by applied load and speeds. However, Lapox L-12 with boron carbide fillers reinforced composites exhibits higher wear resistance with smooth worn surface morphologies. The improvement in the tensile and wear behavior of L-12 epoxy with B4C composites can be utilized for several applications like air intake duct and air intake lip of an aircraft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]