DEVELOPMENT OF AL-BASED METAL MATRIX COMPOSITES REINFORCED WITH HYBRID NANO PARTICLES AND ITS MACHINABILITY TEST

Abstract

Aluminum is a significant material for all type of manufacturing industries due to its wide range of alloys and composites. Despite the fact that aluminum alloys have been used in a wide range of industries due to their excellent and diverse functional characteristics, composite materials can be modified to provide specific mechanical and tribological properties. An aluminum alloy with lesser hardness and tensile strength has been strengthened dramatically by adding ceramic reinforcements. This study aims at formulate and develop hybrid particle reinforced Al-metal matrix composites using stir casting method, a novel fabrication process in our country to fabricate metal matrix composite. Also, followed by investigation of its the physical, mechanical, morphological and machinability characteristics of the developed metal matrix composites. Three unique compositions of composites have been obtained by varying the wt. % amount of carbon nanotube, alumina and silicon carbide particulate reinforcements respectively 1%, 2.5% and 2.5%. Various mechanical properties, essentially the tensile strength, flexural strength, hardness, impact resistance; and physical properties like porosity, and density were tested; and a morphological and machinability study has been carried out for investigating the performance of the newly developed composites. The study showed that there was an 128.57% increment of tensile strength, an 7.1349% increment of hardness, an 45% increment of impact resistance, and a 0.8301% reduction of density by adding the particulate reinforcements in aluminum metal matrix composite. The morphological analysis demonstrated a more homogenous dispersion of reinforcement particles in the composite, which indicated the effectiveness of the stir-casting fabrication method. From the optimized machining parameters, it was evident that higher cutting speed and feed rate can be obtained by introducing multiple particulate reinforcement in the metal matrix, which eventually increased the productivity, efficiency and product quality of the developed composites.