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Top1. Introduction
The use of polymer composites is widely increasing in industrial applications due to the properties like lightweight, high specific strength compared to other materials, and thermal expansion (Ballo & Närhi, 2017). Due to this, polymer composites have found their application in aerospace industries, automobile parts, sports equipment, etc (Gawdzik et al., 2001).In an another study (Dikshit et al., 2017) it was reported that despite good in-plane properties, polymer composites exhibit poor interlamination behavior. In the past two decades, various literature (Gnaba et al., 2017; Yuan et al., 2012) has shown different techniques like z-pining, stitching, plasma treatment, thermal modification, which have been explored to improve the interlamination behavior. The use of nanofillers in composites has shown potential in the improvement of the mechanical and tribological properties of composites (Wu et al., 2018). The researchers have used nano clay, graphene silica, glass powder, etc. as filler material to develop the nanocomposites (Wu et al., 2018). It has been reported that the load-carrying capacity and mechanical strength of the composite are improved significantly by reinforcement of carbon and glass fibers (Chang et al., 2006).
Many researchers (Agarwal et al., 2014; Chen et al., 2012; Gupta & Srivastava, 2016; Omrani et al., 2016; Shanmugam et al., 2016; Yallew et al., 2015) in the past decades have developed hybrid composites and have performed experimental investigations to study the tribological behavior of the developed composite. (Gupta & Srivastava, 2016) developed a hybrid sisal/jute fiber reinforced epoxy composite and performed experimental investigations to study the tribological properties. The author varied the sliding speed and normal load during the investigations and found that the developed composite resulted in a lesser specific wear rate. The authors also reported that the alkali treatment of fibers further improved the wear properties of the developed composite. Agarwal et al., (2014) performed the experimental investigations on glass-carbon fiber-reinforced epoxy polymer composite and found that among various parameters abrasive particle size plays a significant role in the specific wear rate of composite followed by fiber percentage and normal load. They further found that the effect of sliding distance was insignificant on the wear rate of the developed composite. In another study (VishalRajkumarAnnamalai et al., 2021) it was found that the addition of filler like bamboo carbon nano tube and synthetic diamond plays a significant role in reducing the coefficient of friction reduced by 30% and specific wear rate by 39% under maximum loading condition. Chen, Wang and Yan, (2012) performed a comparative experimental investigation of wear properties on polyetheretherketone (PEEK) composites reinforced with carbon fiber, under seawater lubrication, pure water lubrication, and dry friction. The study revealed that due to the better lubricating effect of seawater, the friction and wear properties were better under seawater lubrication. Shanmugam et al. (2016) reported that the wear loss and coefficient of friction were reduced due to the reinforcement of palmyra palm leaf stalk fibers in polymer composites. Yallew et al.(2015) found that the reinforcement of natural fibers in polypropylene polymer resulted in the reduction of specific wear rate and has very little effect on the coefficient of friction.