EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON HARDNESS FOR SINTERED SICP REINFORCED AMMCS USING THE RESPONSE SURFACE METHOD

Abstract

Limited efforts are being made so far to synthesize Al-SiC particle composite using powder metallurgy route and characterize the composites in terms of microstructure, mechanical properties e.g. hardness. The composite shows uniform distribution of SiC particles and good interface bonding between SiC particles and the metallic matrix. The variation of hardness with respect to the variation of process parameters viz. compacting pressure, sintering temperature and sintering time has been observed. To achieve optimum hardness of PMMCs, the percentage of reinforcement materials, compacting pressure, sintering time are considered as the controllable process parameters and related response variable is hardness. A 2 3 full factorial design of experiments (DOE) was used to collect experimental data to statistically analyze the effect of the process parameters on the hardness of the sintered Al-SiCp composites. It is observed that the weight percentage of SiCp, compacting pressure (Ton), sintering time (minute) strongly influence the response variables, hardness. A second order responses surface model (RSM) has been used to develop a predicting equation of hardness based on the data collected by a statistical design of experiments known as central composite design (CCD). The analysis of variance (ANOVA) shows that the observed data fits well into the assumed second order RSM model.