Thermal expansion behaviour of aluminium/SiC composites with bimodal particle distributions

The thermal response and the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of aluminium matrix composites having high volume fractions of SiC particulate have been investigated. The composites were produced by infiltrating liquid aluminium into preforms made either from a single particle size, or by mixing and packing SiC particulate of two largely different average diameters (170 and 16 mum, respectively). The experimental results for composites with a single particle size indicate that the hysteresis in the thermal strain response curves is proportional to the square root of the particle surface area per unit volume of metal matrix, in agreement with current theories. Instead, no simple relationship is found between the hysteresis and any of the system parameters for composites with bimodal particle distributions. On the other hand, the overall CTE is shown to be mainly determined by the composite compactness or total particle volume fraction; neither the particle average size nor the particle size distribution seem to affect the overall CTE. This result is in full agreement with published numerical results obtained from finite element analyses of the effective CTE of aluminum matrix composites. Our results also indicate that the CTE varies with particle volume fraction at a pace higher than predicted by theory. (C) 2003 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.