Investigations on dry sliding wear behavior of in situ casted AA7075-TiC metal matrix composites by using Taguchi technique

High strength 7075 aluminum matrix composites with 4 and 8 wt.% of TiC particulate reinforcement was synthesized by reactive in situ casting technique. X-ray diffraction analysis and scanning electron microscopy were used to confirm the presence of TiC particles and its uniform distribution over the aluminum matrix. The dry sliding wear behavior of the as-casted composites was investigated based on Taguchi L-27 orthogonal array experimental design to examine the significance of reinforcement quantity, load, sliding velocity and sliding distance on wear rate. The combination of 4 wt.% of TiC, 9.81 N load, 3 m/s sliding velocity and 1500 m sliding distance was identified as the optimum blend for minimum wear rate using the main effect plot. Load and sliding velocity were identified as the highly contributing significant parameters on the wear rate using ANOVA analysis. Further a confirmation test was also conducted with the optimum parameter combination for validation of the Taguchi results. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.