Mechanical and Machinability characteristics of Al–NiTi composites reinforced with SiC particulates

Abstract

This paper discusses the effect of the addition of SiC in Al–NiTi composites on hardness and compression of the composites. The addition of SiC in the Al–NiTi composites significantly increases the hardness and compression strength. In addition to the mechanical properties, it also discusses the effect of abrasive water jet pressure, standoff distance, and feed rate during machining of the Al–NiTi–SiC composites. The surface roughness and kerf angle are considered as the output quality characteristics. Experiments are conducted based on L9 orthogonal array. The Techniques for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) with entropy method is used to accomplish the objective of the experimental study. Entropy is a method used to compute the weight factor for each of the output performance characteristics. TOPSIS with entropy reveals that the optimal combination of the machining parameters for the multi-performance characteristics of Al–NiTi–SiC reinforced hybrid is set at a pressure of 225 MPa, standoff distance of 2, feed rate 40 mm/s, and weight percent of reinforcement 3%. The optimal results were compared with the experimental results for verifying the approach, and it is observed that the surface roughness decreases from 4.03 to 3.46 μm, and kerf angle decreases from 16.32 to 14.71.