The Effect of Volume Fraction of the SiC Nanoparticles on Mechanical and Surface Properties of the Al/SiC Composite Produced by Powder Metallurgy

The objective of the present research is to investigate mechanical properties and wear behavior of the Al/vol%SiC (x) nanocomposite under various applied loads and different volume fractions (x= 0, 1, 3 and 5) of reinforcement nanoparticles of SiC. For this purpose, the samples were milled in a high energy ball mill for 1 h under argon atmosphere with powder to ball weight ration of 10:1. To investigate the effect of the applied load on wear behavior of the samples, wear test was performed under the loads of 3, 8 and 20 N at room temperature with sliding speed of 0.11 m/s and sliding distance of 1000 m. Results revealed that under the same applied loads, the composite samples have lower wear rate compared to the un-reinforced aluminum. Also, increase of volume fraction of the reinforcement particles decreases the amount of wear rate and friction coefficient of the composite samples, among which the Al-5vol%SiC sample shows these variations to a greater extent. SEM images revealed that under the load of 3 N, the dominant wear mechanism of the samples is the abrasive mode, and that with increase of the force this mechanism changes in to the adhesive mode for all the samples except Al-vol%SiC.