Improvement of Tensile Strength of Friction Stir Processed AA6086/Tic Surface Composite

Abstract

Friction stir processing (FSP) is a new solid state processing technique that can eliminate casting defects and refine micro structures, enhances mechanical properties of metallic materials. FSP can also produce fine grained structure and can able to fabricate the surface composite. The Aluminum alloy (Al–Mg–Si alloy) has gathered wide acceptance in the fabrication of light weight structures requiring a high strength-to-weight ratio and good corrosion resistance especially in aerospace and automotive industry.
 In this work , The concept of friction stir processing was utilized to successfully disperse the titanium carbide particles of 5 µm on to the surface of AA6086.The Taguchi Design Of Experiments (DOE) was applied to determine the most important factors which influences the ultimate tensile strength of AA6086/TiC surface composites produced by friction stir processing. An L9 orthogonal array, Signal to Noise ratio, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were applied to study the performance characteristics. The high value of S/N ratio indicated that the speed is the most influential parameter and the ANOVA results showed that rotational speed is the most influential parameter. Based on experimentation and statistical analysis, it is found that the UTS is higher with higher rotational speeds and is better with lower transverse feeds.