Investigation on Mechanical and Fatigue behaviour of Aluminium Based SiC/ZrO2 Particle Reinforced MMC

The study is the work on Aluminium Metal Matrix Composites (MMC's), which have wider applications in automobile, aerospace and defense industries, hi-tech engineering and power transmission due to their lightweight, high strength and other unique properties. The Aluminium Matrix Composites (AMC's) refer to a kind of light weight high performance Aluminium centric material system. AMC's consist of a non-metallic reinforcement which when included into aluminium matrix offers an advantage over the base material. Reinforcements like SiC, B4C, Al2O3, TiC, TiB2, TiO2 are normally preferred to improve mechanical properties of such composites. Here Aluminium 6061 is preferred as matrix material, while silicon carbide (SiC) and Zirconium di-oxide (ZrO2) is selected as reinforcement compounds. Conventional Stir casting procedure is employed to fabricate the necessary composites compositions, which are I. Al: SiC:: 100: 5 and II. Al: ZrO2: SiC:: 100: 3: 2. Experimental results depict that the composition II provides higher hardness of 53.6 RHN as opposed to 45.8 RHN of composition I. In tensile strength composition II demonstrates 96.43 N/mm(2) as opposed to 67.229 N/mm(2) tensile strength of composition II. The fatigue test indicate a expected number of life cycles to failure of 10 5 cycles for composition II and over 10 4 cycles for composition I, at stress ranges of 79.062 MPa and 150.651 MPa respectively.