ORIGINAL PAPER Studies for Wear Property Correlation for Carbon Fabric-Reinforced PES Composites Mohit Sharma • Jayashree Bijwe • Kuldeep Singh Received: 3 May 2011 / Accepted: 1 June 2011 / Published online: 14 June 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Polyethersulfone (PES) composites were developed with carbon fabric (CF). Cold remote nitrogen oxygen plasma (CRNOP) treatment was employed to the CF to incorporate functional groups and promote fiber– matrix adhesion. This study includes the effect of PES melt flow index (MFI) on the wettability of CF and its influence on fretting wear performance. Evaluations of fretting wear properties of composites led to the conclusion that the CRNOP treatment proved beneficial to enhance perfor- mance properties significantly. Polymer MFI and treatment to CF proved to be the decisive parameters for controlling performance of composites apart from operating parame- ters. Perforations on the treated carbon fiber, evidently observed by FESEM, improved the fiber–matrix adhesion, and hence the performance properties. Artificial neuron network (ANN) was used for prediction of the wear behavior of composites. Keywords Carbon fibers  Cold plasma  Fretting  Wear  Polyethersulfone  FESEM  Fiber–matrix adhesion  ANN 1 Introduction The components, in interference fit parts and devices if subjected to vibrations, undergo fretting wear which can reduce their reliability for functioning and life span sig- nificantly. These small oscillations are almost inevitable in bearings, gears, bushes, multilayer leaf springs, palliatives, bolted and pinned joints, bearing liners, riveted joints, spline couplings, gripped components, flanges, seals, etc. [1, 2]. Fretting wear also called the low-amplitude oscil- lating (LAO) wear is influenced by operating parameters, such as number of cycles, normal load, slip amplitude, slip frequency, sliding velocity, contact geometry, material properties, environment (lubrication, humidity, tempera- ture, medium, O 2 , and N 2 ), etc. [3]. Fiber-reinforced polymer composites (FRPCs) espe- cially carbon fabric (CF)-reinforced ones are the important tribo-materials, and such studies on LAO wear are essential for the tribo-components where vibrations are inevitable. However, very little has been reported on this aspect in the case of CF-reinforced composites, which is of significant importance in real-life conditions [4–6]. The fabric reinforcements (bidirectional—BD) are pre- ferred over unidirectional ones, owing to their advantages, like ease of handling and processing the composites apart from imparting strength in two directions. The performance of BD composite depends on the types of matrix and fabric, amount, weave, fiber orientation with respect to loading direction, fiber–matrix adhesion, processing technique, etc. The fiber–matrix adhesion in turn depends on the surface morphology of fibers (its roughness and functional groups on its surface) apart from the selected matrix: its molecular weight (MW), melt viscosity/melt flow index (MFI), etc. [7–9]. These aspects in turn affect the performance proper- ties of composites including tribological ones, and not much has been reported regarding the effect of MW or MFI. In our earlier work, the influence of MW on the mechanical properties and abrasive wear performance of CF-reinforced composites containing different grades of PES with varying MWs was reported [10]. In this article, the performance of these PES composites in LAO wear mode is reported. M. Sharma  J. Bijwe (&)  K. Singh Industrial Tribology Machine Dynamics and Maintenance Engineering Centre (ITMMEC), Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, India e-mail: jbijwe@gmail.com 123 Tribol Lett (2011) 43:267–273 DOI 10.1007/s11249-011-9805-7