Erosive wear behaviour of aluminium alloys: a comparison between slurry and dry erosion

Abstract

The erosive wear performance of AA5083 and AA1050 has been investigated under dry and slurry erosion condition. The current work insights the erosive wear behaviour of Al alloys by changing the impact velocity and impingement angle. AA5083 exhibited remarkable erosion resistance compared to AA1050 by a factor of 2.5 to 3 in both the tests. The surface roughness of the eroded surface for impingement angle 15, 60° was an average of 450, 170 μm respectively for dry and slurry erosion test. Hardness of the eroded surface after the erosion test was measured to be 128.6 and 111.5 Hv for AA5083 and 63.9 and 52.9 Hv for AA1050 respectively for dry and slurry erosion. Wear surface studies reveals that cutting as well as abrasion grooves were dominant at lower impingement angle for both the tests. As the impingement angle increased, the material removal process was tuned by ploughing and formation of a crater in dry erosion and cracking in slurry erosion was witnessed. The subsurface study reveals that the affected region beneath the wear surface was an average of 40 and 25 μm for AA1050 and AA5083. Erosion data was correlated with the published empirical erosion model to analyse the dependence of the impingement angle.