Abstract
Magnesium based nanocomposites, due to their excellent dimensional stability and mechanical integrity, have a lot of potential to replace the existing commercial Al alloys and steels used in aerospace and automotive applications. Mg-Al alloys are commercially used in the form of AZ (magnesium-aluminum-zinc) and AM (magnesium-aluminum-manganese) series in automobile components. However, the Mg17Al12 phase in Mg-Al alloys is a low melting phase which results in a poor creep and high temperature performance of the alloys. Rare earth additions modify the phase and hence improve the properties of the materials. In this paper, Ce and nano ZnO particles were added to Mg-Al alloys to attain a favorable effect on their properties. The developed materials exhibited promising properties in terms of thermal expansion coefficient (CTE), hardness, and tensile strength. Further, the ZnO addition refined the microstructure and helped in obtaining a uniform distribution, however without grain size refinement. The increased addition of ZnO and the improvement in the distribution led to an enhancement in the properties, rendering the materials suitable for a wide spectrum of engineering applications.
Highlights
The extraction and utilization of magnesium (Mg) in significant amounts started only in the 20th century, despite the fact that the discovery of Mg by Sir H
This is expected to be due to the high density of ZnO (5.61 g/cc) as compared to that of Mg
This is due to the possible clustering effects caused by the increased addition of nano-reinforcements
Summary
The extraction and utilization of magnesium (Mg) in significant amounts started only in the 20th century, despite the fact that the discovery of Mg by Sir H. Mg based materials display other beneficial properties such as specific mechanical strength, excellent damping capacity, good castability, machinability, thermal stability, weldability, and resistance to electromagnetic radiation [2]. Despite these advantages, Mg has limited ductility under tensile deformation loads, poor elastic modulus, and low resistance to creep at high temperatures. There is a tension-compression yield asymmetry, and a significant difference in tensile and compressive yield strengths exhibited by Mg, which narrows the opportunities of Mg in structural applications To circumvent these limitations, Metals 2016, 6, 276; doi:10.3390/met6110276 www.mdpi.com/journal/metals
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