Excellence of Al-metal matrix composite fabricated by gas injection bottom pouring vacuum stir casting process

Abstract

The present study has envisaged an advance technique, gas injection bottom pouring vacuum stir casting process, for the casting of metal matrix composite (MMCs). This process has been eliminated several manual processing steps of conventional stir casting hence concerns about the workers’ safety and its bottom pouring mechanism & vacuum mould chamber improve the properties of the fabricated MMC. An Al/(10wt% Al2O3) MMC has been fabricated by the proposed technique and characterized for the mechanical and microstructural properties. An experimental plan based on Taguchi L16 orthogonal array has also been used to investigate the factors affecting the wear behaviour. The fabricated Al-MMC has a density of 2.65 gm/cc, micro-hardness of 73.3 HV, tensile strength of 220 MPa and wear rate of 0.0137736 mm3/m, implying in substantial improvements from the matrix Al-alloy. A comparative study with the available literature has been carried out to investigate the possibilities of the proposed method in today’s manufacturing world. The results concluded that the fabricated MMC has significantly enhanced the properties of MMCs when compared to the existing casting techniques. From the results of present study, it has been suggested to employ the process in industrial & allied applications and especially in the research institutes where the researchers are not very skilled for the casting operations.