A Study on the Mechanical Behaviour of Microwave Sintered Aluminium Cenospheres Based Syntacticfoams

Abstract

Aluminium Syntactic Foams(ASF) are metallic foam material that are of great interest to the automobile manufacturers for their light weight coupled with tailorable engineering properties. Sufficient studies have been carried out on development of aluminium cenospheres based light weight syntactic foams which are fabricated through stir casting and melt infiltration techniques but it is seen from the literature that the synthesis of Aluminium Cenospheres metal foams fabricated through Powder Metallurgy (PM) route and densification through Microwave Sintering (MWS) has been less studied. In this context, ASFs comprising of Aluminium metal matrix embedded with fly lsh cenospheres particulates have been fabricated through Powder Metallurgy (PM) route and sintered through Microwave (MW) sintering process at a temperature of 665° C. Cenospheres ranging from 0 to 50 volume%have been incorporated in the mix. The sintered ASF has been taken up for characterization for the mechanical properties such as Compression and Flexural strength. The compression test samples have also been taken up for Finite Elemental Analysis (FEA) and the Flexural Strength tested samples have been studied for fractography using scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). There sultso btained have been compared with aluminium cenospheres foamsthatwere sintered through conventional sintering process at the same temperature in electrical resistance furnace. Microwave sintered samples have shown better mechanical properties compared to the conventionally sinteredones. The study has been conducted to assess the suitability of using these ‘Syntactic Foams’ material for applications in automotives and other engineering applications.