Abstract:
Materials found in earth are nonrenewable and scares. As the need of human being increases
exponentially, new and alternate materials and manufacturing methods are developed and utilized
extensively. Manufacturing of composite material has been an extensive area of research as they have
high strength-to weight ratio that are equivalent or superior to many metallic materials. This paper
describes the preparation of woven fabric or chopped strand fiberglass Reinforced Polymer Composite
(GFRP) water reservoir with different fiber mat material, orientation, unsaturated polyester resin and
different ratio between resin and woven fabric or chopped strand fiberglass. The purpose of this paper is
to investigate the influence of the process parameters on the mechanical properties of GFRP composite
using Taguchi experimental design in combination with Orthogonal array (OA), seven factors ( one has
two levels and the rest have three levels) and L18 (18 experiments were conduct).The predicted and the
observed values are close to each other, then the used model is adequate for describing the effect of
Parameters on quality characteristics and if there is a large difference in observed values and predicted
values then the used model is not adequate. The conclusion revealed that number of layers of woven or
chopped strand fiberglass, types of fiberglass , different ratio between resin and fiberglass and the mixing
time of polyester and calcium carbonates were the most influential factor on the mechanical properties
,percent contribution 70.60%,26.71%,1.88% and 0.51% respectively. It is observed that the optimum
properties were obtained at number of layers of woven or chopped, types of fiberglass, ratio between
resin/unsaturated polyester and fiberglass (3:1 is the best) and the mixing time of polyester and calcium
carbonates (A2B3C2D3E3F3G3 optimum level of the parameters).