Dry Sliding Wear Study of Mild Steel Coated With Titania-Taguchi Approach

Friction in rubbing surfaces causes wear and loss of energy. One way of improving surface resistance to wear is by applying coatings. Steel is the material of present day world where almost every component contains an element of steel. Mild steel is widely used in the fields of automobile, aero-space, domestic use, etc. Tribological studies are gaining importance in the present day world where machinery with high speeds is a trend. In the present work, dry sliding wear behaviour of mild steel coated with Titania is studied for which Taguchi’s and ANOVA techniques are applied. Using pin-on-disc wear apparatus, the tribological behaviour of mild steel coated with Titania coating was studied under dry sliding conditions. The objective is to establish a correlation between dry sliding wear behaviour of mild steel coated with Titania with wear parameters. The influence of wear parameters like applied load, sliding distance and time on the sliding wear rate was investigated. Based on the Taguchi technique, a plan of experiments was performed to acquire data in a controlled way. The need for repeated experiments is eliminated by the Taguchi’s orthogonal arrays and thus time, material and cost can be saved. The magnitude of effect of input parameters influencing wear rate was determined using ANOVA. The results showed that increase in load and sliding time decreases the wear rate of mild steel coated with Titania significantly. It is found that the sliding speed is the most powerful influencing factor for the dry sliding wear of the coatings.