Magnesium alloy-silicon carbide composite fabrication using chips waste

Abstract

Interest in Mg-based composites has grown with their potential use as engineering materials due to having a high strength-to-weight ratio, wear resistance, and creep behavior. While magnesium chips are typically considered as waste on production shop floors, there can be a promising way to fabricate Mg-based composites with carefully distributed reinforcements. This research is concerned with the reuse of AZ91 magnesium-alloy chips to fabricate Mg-based composites. The fabrication process requires to collect and clean magnesium chips and then mix them with SiC particles as reinforcements. Finally, this composition is melted and stirred by a stir casting method to fabricate the AZ91/SiC composites. The results clearly show that not only magnesium chips waste can be reused in a sustainable way, but also that they improve the reinforcement distribution substantially, leading to enhanced mechanical properties so that the composite yield strength increases by 62.7% when adding 5% SiC particles, volume percentage. Moreover, the composites with 5% reinforcements, demonstrate a hardness increase of about 46%.