Effect of Fabrication Parameters on the Performance of 0.5 wt.% Graphene Nanoplates-Reinforced Aluminum Composites.

Shu Mei Lou,Yong Qiang Liu,Chuan Dong Qu,Qing Biao Wang,Guang Xin Guo,Ping Ping Zhang,Chun Jian Su,Ling Wei Ran

doi:10.3390/ma13163483

Shu Mei Lou, Yong Qiang Liu + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ma13163483

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Abstract

Aluminum composites reinforced by graphene nanoplates(GNP) with a mass fraction of 0.5% (0.5 wt.% GNP/Al) were fabricated using cold pressing and hot pressing. An orthogonal test was used to optimize the fabrication parameters. Ball milling time, ball milling speed, and ultrasonic time have the largest influence on the uniformity of the graphene in the composites. Afterwards, the microstructure, interfacial properties, and fracture morphology of the composites obtained with different parameters were further analyzed. The results show that ball milling time and ball milling speed have obvious influences on the mechanical properties of the composite. In this paper, when the ball milling speed is 300 r/min and the ball milling time is 6 h, the dispersion uniformity of graphene in the 0.5 wt.% GNP/Al composite is the best, the agglomeration is the lowest, and the mechanical properties of the composites are the best, among which the tensile strength is 156.8 MPa, 56.6% higher than that of pure aluminum fabricated by the same process (100.1 MPa), and the elongation is 19.9%, 39.8% lower than that of pure aluminum (33.1%).

Highlights

Aluminum is a structural material used commonly in aerospace, automobile, machinery, electronics, and other fields because of its light weight, high strength, good ductility, easy processing, and so on [1,2,3]
GNP/Al composites were studied via comparison of the macroscopic mechanical properties or microscopic characterization
The effects of the three major fabrication parameters on the properties of the 0.5 wt.% GNP/Al composites studied via comparison of the macroscopic mechanical properties or microscopic Materials 2020,were

Summary

Introduction

Aluminum is a structural material used commonly in aerospace, automobile, machinery, electronics, and other fields because of its light weight, high strength, good ductility, easy processing, and so on [1,2,3]. Graphene is an ideal reinforcement for metal matrix composites due to its good friction properties [5,6,7,8,9], high conductivity [10,11], high thermal conductivity [12,13], good mechanical properties [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22], and so on. GNP retains some residual oxygen groups, which have a positive effect on the mechanical properties as well as the interfacial structure of the composites.

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