1. Introduction
In the aerospace and vehicle transport industries, the carbon fiber reinforced polymers are being increasingly researched and more widely developed in many applications due to their strength, hardness, and high fatigue resistance [
1]. Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) drilling machining technology has been widely developed, and includes methods such as the traditional drilling technique, the fiber laser drilling technique [
2], and the abrasive water-jet drilling technique [
3]. The traditional drilling method is simple, saves money, and achieves a certain efficiency. The input factors that affect product quality, as well as ensure the output evaluation criteria of the processing process, were invested and studied. In addition to the accuracy of the bore diameter tolerances and the surface roughness of the hole, the peripheral geometry, such as uncut fiber and the delamination, was also emphasized. The influence of the drill geometry under the action of thrust force causes the delamination to indicate that the thrust force is distributed toward the boundary of the drill in place of being located at the centerline. The feed rate can also be increased without affecting on the delamination [
4]. The use of a multi-facet drill can help to release the delamination and improve the quality of the surface [
5]. Soaked experiments with different machining fluids, such as Hocut 795B, Hocut GR3000, Cindolube V30ML, and Metalina B800 were used at a temperature of 60 °C. The adhesive strength and beam shear test were applied to verify the mechanical debasement of the sample. The lowest prejudicial effect on the mechanical properties and non-hygroscopic properties of the specimen test were found when used with Cindolube V30ML [
6]. The fracture toughness of a concrete/CFRP bonded test was reduced to 62.8% after exposed to water at 23 °C and 50 °C for 8 weeks [
7]. The load deflection relationship of CFRP-bond wood test is decreased from 57.53 kN to 33.15 kN when the time of humidity exposure of the sample is increased from 0 to 8 weeks [
8]. The benefit of cryogenic combined minimum lubrication is that it has the ability to ameliorate the tool life, and the surface roughness, compared with the regular coolant method. The experiment was observed at a cutting speed of 100 m/min [
9,
10]. From the above, in this study, the new characteristic concept of the tool drill geometry is the twist angle of the cutting edge, namely, the twist angle of the drill blade on the quality of the drill hole, which was chosen as the survey input factor. At the same time, cryogenic CO
2 is also investigated as another input parameter of the drilling process.
With the advanced quality machining, studies about CFRP machining have studied the parameter process, and improvement by compounding hybrid material. With the aim of achieving quality parameters for the tool wear, thrust force, and torque, the Nelder–Mead and genetic algorithm were applied to optimize the input parameters of the coir fiber-reinforced composites drilling process, such as drill diameter, spindle speed, and feed rate [
11]. A full factorial experiments design was applied to quantify the geometrical parameters of the drill tool, such as helicoidal, brad center, step, and reamer. The use of the response surface methodology generates the optimum response output of the torque, the delamination, and the thrust force [
12]. The combination of the multi-response optimization method with principal component analysis (PCA), and the Taguchi base on fuzzy inference system (FIS), has been proposed to evaluate the suitable parameter settings in direction of the optimization of the delamination, thrust force, and torque factor in the CFRP drilling process [
13]. Recently, many handling techniques, such as Response Surface Methodology [
14], the Genetic Algorithm [
14], Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) [
15,
16,
17,
18], and Neural Networks [
15,
19,
20] have developed to optimize machining parameters that are time consuming and require a coding system to resolve multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems.
Grey relational analysis (GRA) was conducted to optimize the multi-input factors for performing the best response of output factors [
21,
22,
23]. GRA is a section in the grey system first deduced [
24,
25], which is an advantageous technique to deal with poor-quality, deficient, and dim data [
26] that is nominated for grey data. The GRA was further improved with the extension of fuzzy logic theory into the system with more quantities of variables to achieve a more advantageous response output [
27,
28,
29]. The technique for order of preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is a simple and efficient way to solve processes using MCDM [
30,
31]. In general, it is not easy to produce the ultimate solution to a problem in real-time. Thus, TOPSIS method is available with two different classes of the ultimate decision based on the strongest or weakest response of the option correlated with various measures. The classify-based approach [
32] is studied to choose the strongest and weakest response, as short as possible, from and to the ultimate decision. The TOPSIS method expects the probable input data for resolving multiple criteria problems. The weight ratio determination helps to give exact correlated output responses in real-time problems [
33,
34]. The benefits of TOPSIS come from it being simple and understandable, and applying deftly computation techniques [
35]. Previous studies usually only assessed the weight and percentage contribution of the input factors. However, the weight of the output factors plays a very important role in attribute group decision-making. Determining and measuring the weight of decision-making is an interesting study field. The goal of this study was to propose a novel approach to determine the optimal parameter of the CFRP drilling process, as shown in
Figure 1, in which an extended TOPSIS technique, based on the grey coefficient with the contribution of the entropy weights, is presented.
The remaining part of this study was presented as follows:
Section 2 gives the material and method. The design of the experiment included the selection of the material characteristic, the specification of the drilling tool, the design of the parameter process, and measurement process. The grey relational coefficient embed to the technique for order of preference by similarity to an ideal solution (Grey-TOPSIS) algorithm was also described. Then, the analysis and discussion was shown in
Section 3. The proposed method of applying the data results from the experiment was performed and the optimal results are analyzed and discussed. In
Section 4, a confirmation test was suggested to validate the benefits of the proposed method.
Section 5 presents the conclusion.
3. Analysis and Discussion
The GRA is conditioned by the data results, which was inducted out following the previous step. First, based on the target of the response output, in this study, normalization was presented according to the “smaller is better” approach. Second, divergence from the relation list was computed. Next, the GRC of each experiment were computed. Finally, the mean value of the GRG for the surface roughness, uncut fiber, and delamination were computed using Equations (3)–(9). The result is illustrated in
Table 4.
The GRG with highest value was always yearned. It was presented that the drilling parameter of the 25th experiment had the highest, with a grey relation grade of 0.923, as shown in
Table 4 and illustrated in
Figure 7. Thus, the 25th experiment had the best multi-response output among the 27 experiments.
The GRG was used to express the rank of a correlation between the consultation series and the referenced series. With the larger GRG, it means that the comparability series are significantly correlated with the consultation series. The signal to noise (S/N) ratio analysis is used to specify the optimal drilling parameter constraints for each attribute L, T, F, respectively. As the response value for S/N ratios of GRG in
Figure 8, the optimal combination of the drilling parameter was observed at L3T3F1.
Table 5 shows the response table for the means, which specify the delta value of the drilling process parameter.
The quality of the drill process was observed at the feed rate of 228 mm/min, high helix twist angle, and cryogenic gas lubrication, respectively.
The first step of the TOPSIS method used in this study was to sort the attributes and alternatives as the input parameters and response output of the experiment, which is transformed into the grey relation coefficient by the GRA process, placed to the decision matrix X. Equations (10) and (11) were used to normalize the decision matrix X with matrix G. The benefit attribute and cost attribute have a relationship that is computed by Equation (13). The value of the two attributes is inversely proportional. When the value of the benefit attribute is increased, the value of the cost attribute is decreased. Moreover, the amount of change is the same. Therefore, the benefit attribute was chosen for analysis. In this paper, the entropy method was applied to specify the attribute weight using Equations (14)–(17), respectively. The results are given in
Table 6. Matrix Y was computed by Equation (18) with attribute weight
.
In the next step, the positive and negative ideal solutions were computed using Equations (19) and (20). The closest alternative range from PIS and the furthest alternative range from NIS were observed by Equations (21) and (22). The nearest coefficient is computed using Equation (23). The final step was the selection of alternatives according to the value of
, in which the largest
was the best choice. The resulting values are presented in
Table 7.
According to the 27 experiments described above, the 25th experiment showed the highest closeness coefficient, indicating that it was nearest to the ideal value. The optimal parameter was determined to be (L3T3F1). Even so, the Taguchi technique was applied to great value, to find an even more profitable experimental parameter that could locate areas outside the range of the experiment domain. The result is shown in
Table 8.
The S/N ratio data and raw data provided the same optimal level by drawing the main effects plot. The result is illustrated in
Figure 9.
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied to verify the essential level of the parameter input influencing the multi–response output of the CFRP drilling process. The referred confidence and significance level were 0.95 and 0.05, respectively.
As shown in
Table 9, the lubrication, twist angle, and feed rate were remarkable factors, and the interaction of the lubrication and twist angle also had significant value. The lubrication had the highest contribution ratio at 52.88%. Therefore, the cryogenic gas had the most significant impact on the quality of the drilling hole based on the preferred criterion output. The contribution ratio of the twist angle and feed rate was at 26.10% and 8.43%, respectively. R squared was observed at 96.88%, which means this linear regression model was suitable for the data set at 96.88%.
S | R_sq | R_sq(adj) | PRESS | R_sq(pred) |
0.0959580 | 96.88% | 89.87% | 0.839074 | 64.51% |
5. Conclusions
With a particular aspect of the CFRP composites machining technology, the lubrication and tool geometry were investigated in many studies. Based on the experimental and processing data, the lubrication cryogenic gas was the most remarkable attribute when observing quality criteria, such as the surface roughness, the uncut fiber, and the delamination caused during the drilling process.
In this study, the TOPSIS optimization technique based on the GRC was proposed to validate the optimal parameter process. The closest coefficient value was used to specify the greatest parameters to achieve minimized surface roughness, uncut fiber, and delamination of the drilling hole. The optimal result was detected by L3T3F1 (cryogenic CO2 lubrication, a high helix twist angle, feed rate of 228 mm/min) to obtain the greatest response, and a minimized surface roughness of 14.9567 μm, no uncut fiber, and a delamination of 1.02 mm2. ANOVA was used to confirm the distribution impact of the input parameters of the drilling process. The contributions of the lubrication, twist angle, and feed rate were 52.88%, 26.1%, and 8.43%, respectively. The analyzed results could be used to achieve the desired response quality under practical parameters in the drilling process.
The results indicate that the proposed model is useful to facilitate the MCDM problem under an environment of uncertainty and vagueness. This relatively advanced approach is very effectual in rejecting process variation, and is a great assistive strategy compared to other MCDM approaches. Each response has been weighted and diminishes the versatility of the process of decision-making (DM).
The productiveness of the method could reach further capacity, and could be applied with a large quantity of multi-criteria inputs and response outputs. The experimental method could be enlarged to other drilling parameter processes and evaluations. Furthermore, this optimization method could be meaningfully and beneficially applied to other machining technologies.