Medium Density Fiber board is an industrial wood product belongs to wood based composite. It is made out of wood waste fibers clued together with resin by heat and pressure. Nowadays the MDF products are preferred over solid waste in many applications due to certain comparative advantages and mainly used in furniture industry. This paper discusses the use of Taguchi and Response surface methodologies for minimizing the surface roughness in drilling MDF material by a (K20) Brad and spur carbide drill bits. The experiments have been conducted based on Taguchi's experimental design technique. The drilling parameters used are speed, feed rate and drill diameter. The effect of drilling parameters on surface roughness is evaluated and the optimum cutting condition for minimizing the surface roughness is determined. Second order model have been established between the drilling parameters and surface roughness using response surface methodology. The experimental result reveals that the most significant drilling parameter for surface roughness is feed rate followed by speed. The predicated values and measured values are fairly close, which indicates that the developed model can be effectively used to predict the surface roughness in the drilling of MDF composites. The predicated results are validated by using validation experiments.

Key words: Taguchi technique, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Drilling, MDF board, Response Surface Methodology, Surface finish