Investigation of High Stress Abrasive and Erosive Wear Behaviour of AA336/TiB2/SiC Ex Situ Composites

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to investigate the erosive and high stress abrasive or sliding wear of the aluminium matrix alloy (AA336) and its particulate composites using silicon carbide and titanium diboride as reinforcement. The erosion of Al amalgam composites were performed at various erodent concentrations (40, 60 and 80 wt%) and varying speed of 1000 and 1500 rev/min. FESEM uncovered that Al–Si interface destinations was the special site of erosion assault. In aqueous medium, material removal decreased by 11% in silicon carbide composites as compared to alloy and 9–10% decreased in material removal for titanium diboride-based composite as compared to silicon carbide-based composites The high stress abrasive test was conducted at different abrasive sizes (88, 60, 44 and 37 μm) and a load of 20 N and 30 N was applied for sliding distance of 200 m and 300 m at a sliding speed of 5.2 m per second. For high stress abrasive wear, an improvement of 63–87% was found to be in silicon carbide-based composites and improvement of 20–26% was found to be in titanium diboride-reinforced composites. Friction heating was found to be increased by 13–16% for silicon carbide-based composites. On the other hand, an increase in temperature was found to be 2–5% in titanium diboride-based composites. Fracture propagation micro-cutting, cracks, ploughing, crater formation were creditworthy for material removal.