Tribological characterization of stir cast hybrid aluminium metal matrix composites and optimization using taguchi technique

Abstract

Over past few decades silicon carbide SiC particle reinforced Aluminium Metal Matrix Composites AMMCs have been developed owing to their excellent properties like light weight high levels of strength stiffness and wear resistance Thus silicon carbide reinforced aluminium matrix composites are expected to be vital in aerospace automobile and electronic applications and hence quite a number of work are focused on such composites Boron carbide B4C possesses better reinforcement characteristics and reinforcing the same along with SiC would be a motivating option However only limited work has been found in literature concerning two reinforcement particulates In this research an attempt is made to study the effect of two hard phase reinforcement particulates namely silicon carbide with varying weight percent and a constant weight percentage of boron carbide on tribological behavior of Al 6061 and Al 7075 alloy matrices The weight percentages of silicon carbide particulate considered here are 5 10 and 15 whereas for boron carbide 3 weight is used throughout the study Aluminium alloy as base matrix is reinforced with a mixture of two types of particulates along with magnesium Mg as binding element The composite thus formed is termed as hybrid composite These hybrid composites are manufactured by the stir cast liquid metallurgy method