Effects of Nigerian Plant Gum Binder in the Optimized Multi-response Performance of Cashew Nut Shells Based Composites for Automobile Brake Pads

Abstract

There are emerging growing needs to develop automobile brake pad materials from agro-biomass sustainable sources which are lung and environmentally friendly towards replacing asbestos which has been reported to cause other cancerous diseases. It has been established that many research works have been done towards replacing asbestos with other environmentally friendly reinforcement materials but not much has been reported on the replacement of inorganic resins like Phenolic or Formedehyde and the epoxy resins mostly used as the binder which have toxic health concerns and also known to corrode plates of brake pad assembly. Therefore, Agro-biomass such as agricultural residues, wastes and products especially from fibers and plant exudates have now emerged as the new and inexpensive materials that could be used to form parts of brake pads composite matrix that are commercially viable and environmentally acceptable. This study reveals a substitute research direction with the replacement of the inorganic resin binder with Plant Gum binder like the Nigerian Gum Arabic-NGA. Taguchi Design of Experimental method was deployed to generate twenty seven (27) trial composites of particle size 300 μm for the brake pads production. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) from the optimized Grey Relational Analysis indicated that the Nigerian Gum Arabic-NGA has significant effects on the multi-response performance of the developed brake pads with percentage contribution (p-value) of 18.503%.