Friction and Wear behaviors of epoxy resin reinforced with carbonized bamboo flour sliding against 52100 steels

Waste biomass materials, including rice husks, bamboo, and others, possess many advantages containing renewability, low-cost and eco-friendship, and directly burning of these biomass materials will result in environmental pollution. To reuse waste biomass as fillers in polymers for enhancing their tribological properties, bamboo powder was carbonized at high temperature. Subsequently, composites based on carbonized bamboo flour (CBF) and epoxy acrylate (EP) were synthesized via photopolymerization. The wear and friction behaviors of carbonized bamboo flour/epoxy resin-based composites sliding against 52100 steels was investigated. The wear rate of the composites containing 2.0 wt.% modified CBFs was approximately 5.2 × 10⁻³ mm³/Nm, which decrease by 37.5% compared to that of EP disc. Furthermore, the wear rate of the CBF/EP composite was slightly lower than that of the graphene oxide (GO)/EP composite. The superior tribological properties of the CBF/EP composite can be attributed to the enhanced hardness, elastic modulus, hardness-to-elastic modulus ratio, and failure stress of the composite. The transfer films formed on the worn surface of steel balls effectively mitigates direct contact between the sliding pairs, thereby substantially enhancing the tribological performance of the composite.