Abstract
Due to the demand in present industrial, aerospace, defense sectors for lightweight high-performance aluminum (Al) particle-reinforced metal matrix composites, the advancement of techniques to fabricate these composites with superior mechanical properties have gained technological interest in the modern world. In this direction, SiC and graphite reinforced AA7075 matrix composite material has been fabricated in this study, through hybrid microwave sintering techniques. The microwave sintering temperatures for the optimized volume fraction composition of AA7075/SiC/graphite hybrid composite has been varied from 400 to 550 °C with a step value of 50 °C. The obtained results showed a superior improvement in the mechanical properties for microwave sintered composites as compared to the conventionally sintered composites. Mechanical properties are found to show increasing trend with increasing microwave sintering temperatures up to 500 °C, after that, a downfall is observed in their mechanical properties, which can be attributed to the increased average grain size of the composite at 550 °C. Selection of SiC as primary reinforcement material helped in achieving high mechanical strengths, and through microwave sintering, an increment of 37.2% in tensile, 26.6% in compression, and 16.5% in hardness is achieved. From this investigation, it is also observed that the selection of materials that shows high response to microwaves helps in achieving the enhanced mechanical properties for the hybrid composites processed by microwave sintering techniques.
Highlights
Among the available composite materials, the particle-reinforced aluminum metal matrix composites are gaining huge attention and demand day by day in industrial, defense and aerospace sectors due to their superior features such as high strength-to-weight ratio, high stiffness, corrosion resistance, high wear resistance, and low-cost as compared to the traditional aluminum alloys [1,2,3,4]
The investigation was carried out in order to find out the optimized volume fraction levels of Silicon Carbide (SiC) and graphite in AA7075 matrix material through the conventional sintering technique
As compared to our previous work, where graphite was added as a primary reinforcement material and SiC as a secondary, in this work, the SiC was added as a primary reinforcement and graphite as a secondary particle, which showed a superior enhancement in the overall mechanical properties of the composite material
Summary
Among the available composite materials, the particle-reinforced aluminum metal matrix composites are gaining huge attention and demand day by day in industrial, defense and aerospace sectors due to their superior features such as high strength-to-weight ratio, high stiffness, corrosion resistance, high wear resistance, and low-cost as compared to the traditional aluminum alloys [1,2,3,4]. Selection of reinforcement particles is mainly associated with many factors including the type of application intended, matrixmaterial used, volume fraction levels, reinforcement material, shape, size, orientation, and dispersion of reinforcement particles in matrix materials. These factors severely affect the mechanical properties of the composite materials [5,6,7]. It is found that the composites fabricated via conventional techniques often contain many defects such as high porosities, weak interface bonds due to poor wetting behavior between liquid matrix and reinforcement particles, and large differences in density of the matrix and reinforcement particles, which result in non-uniform dispersion of reinforcement particles in the matrix materials [16,17,18]. The moderate sintering temperatures help in lowering the flow stress levels in the matrix materials and reduce the voids between the reinforcement particles [19, 20]
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